Wish to create desktop app that combines facebook and email accounts all in one go - stuck at the first hurdle?

first poster :)

As the title says, I开发者_如何学运维 am looking to create a desktop app which will notify me of changes on facebook and new emails, and the facebook part (the first part I've tried) is baffling me. I've never worked with an api before, and have no idea how to integrate facebook's api with this desktop helper I want to create. I will be using java to create this desktop helper.

Thanks in advance!

Here are few pointers for you to get started. Please feel free to ask for clarifications and I will edit my answer accordingly:

1. For facebook, you can actually pull all those info via their API. There are a lot of types for API, but Facebook specifically use REST API over http.

   • To simplify, think of it as making an http call with specific parameters and you will be getting an output back.

   • In order to use facebook API you need to understand their protocol including authentication/login and how to request for things that you want. This would require some reading to their documentation which is pretty complete and available at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/.

   • For the description of their API URL and the input/output documentation, you could directly jump to Graph API Documentation http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/.

   • In order to call their API via HTTP from Java, you could leverage HttpClient library from Apache Http Components project http://hc.apache.org/. They have plenty of tutorial and examples for how to make http call using HttpClient

2. For combining with all other emails accounts (per your question), you need to deal with SMTP or IMAP (whichever email protocol that you are planning to combine with Facebook). This is already built-in to Java via their Java Mail API collection

3. You then can poll this data on interval basis to get an update from Facebook and your mails

4. Once you have figured out how to get the data, the rest is just following a good MVC framework. That means separating out your presentation, data and controller (application logic). Make sure that you are separating the classes for #1 and #2 and each of them put their data to normalized data format that then get feed to your View (presentation layer)