Car racing facebook application

Category: Social Networking | Industry: Game

Before rolling out the full website car-racing application to the market,

this startup company made us built the facebook version of the application as a marketing strategy.

The application is built in early 2008, using the rfacebook plugin.

It's a cool social car racing application where users can race each other, get points if win, modify their cars, or buy a new car.

This facebook app uses iframe; but we can do pure FBML as well.

There are a lot of interesting things in this project

• Because we want to be DRY, the facebook app acts as a REST consumer only (using ActiveResource) and minimally uses database, and the main website as the REST server.
• In so doing, the controller and model methods mostly calls a REST web service, and thus we have to mock and stub our tests, using Mocha.
• Also, since the application calls two web services (the main app and Facebook API), it feels slow. Thus we use starling to boost performance. For example, updating facebook profile on the background after a certain action.
• The client wants an accompanying myspace app (although eventually the myspace app was canceled). Same RoR code, but different response if called from MySpace. Also, the myspace app needs to enable users to login using their facebook account. We do this using Facebook Connect.