I am thinking of entering the Facebook application business and hiring a programmer. However, before I get there, I wanted to know what I should know about the process. 1. What scripting language does it use? 2. Is there anything in particular that I should screen candidates for? 3. If I want to do a mashup application (ex: Yahoo! Maps), what extra skills are required to accomplish both tasks? 4. What should I expect to pay for an average sized application development? 5. Is maintenance of the product time consuming (from a technical perspective)? Thank you for any insight. Artashes
Ok, i'll try and at least answer some of your questions. Much like websites, mostly facebook applications are coded in PHP. PHP5 to be precise, though PHP4 does work without all the functionality. They can also be coded in coldfusion, asp, javascript and flash. I personally don't know anything about this though. Generally PHP will be fine. Obviously, if you want to do a yahoo maps mashup, for example, you will need someonewho is familiar with both apis. It would be possible, but i'd ask for the coder to make an example before you commit to purchase, just to be sure that he can do it. I charge between $30 and $200 for an application, but i really take on massively large jobs because i don't have the time commitment with university, if it's a big job, you should expect it to be a bit more than this. Technical maintenance is non existent - mostly. It's not different from running a website. Infact it's best to think of your applicatin as a website that runs inside a frame on facebook (which it essentially is) but has the ability to interact with facebook to add and retrieve data.
1) It uses a REST API and therefore any programming language can be used 2) Previous experience? 3) No extra skills though experience with the different components will make development smoother 4) How long is a piece of string? Anything from a few dollars to tens of thousands depending on the complexity of the project, country of the developer, freelancer or company etc 5) Depends what you mean as maintenance... from a technical perspective it will be small as the only thing that will need to be done is changing code as the API changes but a developer worth their salt will be using their own catalogue of components and so if one element changes the cost of the update is effectively split across all the clients with facebook pages as it is a case of change once and upload many times rather than having to change each one individually. That said, best practices like this are most common with companies over freelancers.
Gentlemen, thank you both for your feedback and introductory message. I really appreciate your insight!