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[Rant] Facebook API: avoid at all costs

Paweł Świątkowski on August 27, 2018

I have been in charge of developing and maintaining integration with Facebook Marketing API for more than half a year now. It has been nothing but ...
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preece profile image
Casey Clyde •

Thank you! I have to work with the Facebook API all day (among 20 other APIs) and it is in many ways the worst. Glad someone else hates them too.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern •

Lol this does not surprise me at all.

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xowap profile image
Rémy 🤖 •

That's why I consider that anything made by Facebook is irrelevant. Except maybe Yarn.

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Jason Espin •

I'd hardly consider React irrelevant.

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xowap profile image
Rémy 🤖 •

Thanks for pointing it out, that was precisely the meaning of my message. To be fair, I have not used React extensively and so it's likely that I'm wrong on some points below yet I had much better time with other tools (Vue.js to be specific) and not found the need to explore React this much.

  • There is HTML in JS. This is very consistent with the coding style of the server-side of Facebook which is made in PHP apparently à-la-Wordess. I think that more of a decade of PHP frameworks made the point that this was a bad idea.
    • If anyone is thinking "Facebook is huge and works so it must be a good way to work" I'll refer you to the above article

  • There is no way to tie CSS to components like you can do in a .vue component
    • I'm just talking about putting the code in the same file, which is convenient for many reasons. I'm not talking about intermixing JS and CSS code which would be as bad as mixing JS and HTML (hope I'm not giving bad ideas to anyone here)

  • The learning curve is pretty steep and in fact the tooling required to master React is one of the big factors behind the "JS fatigue"

  • The way JSX does loops using JS functions... That looks smart but that is not legible (especially in the middle of HTML) which is a serious problem
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jason_espin profile image
Jason Espin •

I've also used Vue.js and to be honest a lot of the points above are incorrect.

HTML is JS. I found this week's at first but if you understand the way that React works with the virtual DOM this actually makes a lot of sense.

One of the main features of React is that your CSS for a component is independent of other components just like Vue.

React is probably the easiest library to pickup. I say library because unlike Angular and Vue it does not control its own routing etc.

There are multiple ways to achieve looping. It is likely you have just seen one (sounds bad) variant.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern •

I feel like their OSS is different then their business platforms, though I'd love to hear more about your thoughts if you think otherwise.

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zerquix18 profile image
I'm Luis! \^-^/ •

Just to add something:

  • they reduced the api limits without any notice and broke everyone's code
  • they banned thousands of people from Instant Articles, without any notice and after a month of reported bugs (and they confirmed it as a bug), then they finally said it was a massive ban. -If you wanna create something based on the Facebook API, you need to be a legal business. This is a recent change, now if you're not a company, you can't request permissions, and if you don't have those permissions, you can't make a full product!
  • Instagram'public API was closed with no previous notice as well. Basically Facebook enjoys breaking your code.
  • their app review will take from weeks to months to confirm some permissions, letting your users down. In the end they may reject your request because the app reviewer didn't understand how to use your app, no matter how good you tried to explain it (with a Screencast included)
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3642066 profile image
David Augustus •

Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .
Facebook enjoys breaking your code .

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zerquix18 profile image
I'm Luis! \^-^/ •

It was supposed to be a small addition but I think I needed to spit this out somewhere

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Shayne Darren •

I had to change a part of my thesis due to how unusable their API was. Never again.

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Jason R. Stevens, CFA •

To also /rant and pile on here: their Python client facebook-business API just might qualify for the ugliest client library ever. I'd be nicer if nearly all of the underlying business's profits weren't generated this API.

Typical garbage "C" programmed in the Python language. I think there's few things that set off a Python dev more than that. Oh, yes, please provide me a getter for a static attribute without using properties. It's ridiculous incompetence.

Further, doing it right, and in a reasonably Pythonic style, would take a decent team just a weekend. It's not all that big an api considering the repetitious boilerplate throughout. However, maintaining that lib versus their "graph" REST api would need an entire army's attention, day and night!

What a sham.

If you're from the future and planning to use the facebook-business client api in Python, don't. Grab the HTTP params and do what you need to manually in requests.

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Riley Seaburg •

I'm working on the API certification process now for the FMP-TS program.

I have acknowledged the issues you stated above.

One thing I can tell you is in every disappointment is an opportunity if you know how to manage expectations.

This is a huge opportunity for any developer trying to crack into the industry.

I just got this email from them yesterday.

On a holiday mind you, at night...

From the Program Marketing Manager.

We have noticed a significant uptick in advertiser requests for API-related work. Because of this, many partners not certified for API work have reported seeing a decrease in leads due to being filtered out of the partner matching options when API work is selected. In fact, more than half of all requests in recent months have included API work.

We want to make sure you are set up to potentially receive this new demand, so we are asking select partners to pass the Advertising API Developer Blueprint Certification as quickly as possible, ideally by November 15. If interested, please request a voucher by October 15, 2020 so we can send you next steps. You can find more information below. If you are lacking the capabilities to pass this certification but are interested, please let us know so we can work to support your growth.

This is a great opportunity to ensure you’re set up to support this increased demand for API work. Advertising API Developer grants you access to leads including:
Offline Conversions API
Marketing API
Conversions API
Potential new APIs in the future

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oliverhuynh •

Totally agree. One more point for you guys:

  • The permissions review process is painful. Your app can be declined later even it's approved before. My case. I don't try to resubmit again since it was painful for me a lot.

Just choose another project and resume your energy.

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duke osain • • Edited

Thanks for the post,
Am trying to use facebook graph API to fetch data and displace on my app , am building an app with reactjs, i want to get data from the graph API but am not really sure how to call the request. I want events on facebook base on a particular location, this is the documentation

Any recommendation will really be appreciated
Thanks

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Jason MacLulich •

This is a great post and sums up some of the issues we've had using FB's poorly documented and ever changing API.

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Stanislav(Stas) Katkov •

Not to mention that all their client libraries are generated by autogen tool and code is close to unreadable.