Contest For Facebook Developers

Facebook developers:

Do you have some best practices you can share about building Facebook applications?

Have a good story about some obstacles you had to overcome when building your app?

Do you like to win prizes?

If you answered YES to any two of these questions, we have a contest for you. Sponsored by BrowserMob and FriendRunner, go here to submit your info to win a $100 Amazon gift card. Hurry, submissions close on April 5.

BrowserMob partners with FriendRunner

BrowserMob, the popular cloud-based load testing platform from Neustar has joined forces with FriendRunner to provide a powerful solution for load testing Facebook applications. With these platforms combined, developers will be better able to test Facebook applications and ensure they are ready for viral deployment before launching them publicly to the Facebook community.

BrowserMob allows developers to identify web performance bottlenecks, get a handle on the amount of traffic their site can handle, and make sure that applications are ready for launch. By partnering with FriendRunner, BrowserMob customers can overcome the traditional problems with testing Facebook applications.

Some of the key features of this combined solution include:

• Selenium open-source toolkit
• Export MySQL
• Fast set-up — start testing in minutes, plus run a free test immediately
• Supports testing of Flash applications
• And More….

For more information about the BrowserMob partnership with FriendRunner, please click here.

So You Want To Be A Facebook Entrepreneur?

If you haven’t done so yet, check out this post over at TestFacebook. Lots to think about before starting that venture centering around a Facebook application.

Professional Services

Facebook Testing is a consulting service to help you test your Facebook applications. By focusing on the unique aspects of testing Facebook applications, they can provide you with a unique service. No need to explain to them the differences between Canvas and Connect applications, or what FBML and FQL are – they already know — and have experience testing them.

Facebook Testing is able to help you automate the testing of your Facebook application, and can do this for both functional and load testing. For more information,  please visit Facebook Testing.

Partnership Opportunities

For those of you who follow this blog, it may seem like we haven’t been too active for a while. Let me assure you that this is very far from the truth – in fact we’ve been very busy lately. We’re now ready to give you a small peek behind the curtain to let you know what we’ve been up to.

When we originally conceived of FriendRunner we imagined that it would be an all-in-one tool that customers could use to load test their Facebook applications. That’s what we built, and so far it’s worked out fairly well. However, we’re beginning to realize that there are some things we could be doing better:

• FriendRunner duplicates functionality that exists in other tools

FriendRunner needs to do things like record and edit test scripts, graph timing results, and lots of other things that standard load testing tools already do (and frankly do very well). Duplicating this effort in FriendRunner takes our attention away from providing more features on the Facebook-centric aspects that really add value.

• FriendRunner customers need to learn yet another tool

People who want to load test Facebook applications don’t spontaneously appear – they typically have experience load testing other web applications and have experience with other load testing tools. Forcing these people to read new documentation and learn how to use a new user interface seems like a waste of their time. Since they’re already experts in other tools, it would be better if we allowed them to use FriendRunner through them.

• People are very clever and come up with usage scenarios for FriendRunner that we never imagined

We occasionally come across potential customers who want to do things with FriendRunner that it was never really designed to do. Instead of saying “No, No, No, you’re using it wrong!!” we’d much rather embrace those people’s resourcefulness and provide them with a great solution.

All of this points to the fact that we’d be much better off by modularizing FriendRunner, and allowing other tools to do part of the work where appropriate. And that’s what we’ve been working on,  so now FriendRunner can be easily integrated with other load testing tools to allow them to test Facebook applications. This opens up a world of possibilities for others to partner with us to provide load testing services for Facebook applications.

Load Testing Tool Vendors

This one’s pretty obvious. Standard load testing tools can’t really deal with Facebook applications, but they can now thanks to FriendRunner. There are several ways of integrating FriendRunner with another tool ranging from the really simple to the highly integrated (which is still pretty easy to do). Vendors of these tools that would like to learn more about how to do this should look here.

Load Testing QA Consultants

Consultants that perform QA services for other companies can expand their offerings by using FriendRunner. Since FriendRunner can work with existing load testing tools, the learning curve is very small and they can be offering services in no time. QA consultants that would like to learn more about this should look here.

Digital Media Agencies

Agencies and contractors who build Facebook applications for brands and companies can use Friendrunner as an additional premium service to offer to their customers. To learn more about how you can benefit while offering your customers more services, have a look here.

Facebook’s new location service: Places

Back in March, we predicted the imminent announcement of the Facebook location-based service. Well, we were a little early on that call as Places was announced by Facebook yesterday.

Places is an exciting new turn for Facebook as many cool features and applications will be built using it, and Yes Virginia, FriendRunner will fully support it so that you may load test your location-aware Facebook application. Places is built around the idea of users “Checking in” at places from their mobile device so that their friends and applications can know where they are and where they have been. From a functional point of view, this looks a lot like foursquare.

Facebook has created an API so that applications may interact with Places. Currently, this API only supports Graph API apps, so those of you who are building with the classic RESTful API are SOL. I don’t think this will ever change, as trying to represent something as rich as location using something as complex as the RESTful API will simply end up as a fiasco. Facebook currently allows developers to read users’ checkin information, and some time in the future (apparently currently in private beta) applications will be able to make checkins on their own.

Alright, so where does FriendRunner fit into all of this. Well first off if you weren’t aware, FriendRunner does support, and we absolutely love the Graph API. Without that support there would be no way for us to implement Places. Now the reason we love the Graph API so much is that it’s so well thought out and regimented that querying a list of user checkins looks exactly like querying a list of user friends which looks like querying a list of a user’s favorite books. This means that we should have this support coded up fairly soon so that when you’re ready to load test your location-aware apps, FriendRunner will have you covered.

So go at it and start using location-awareness in your Facebook applications. When the time comes to test these features, let us know how FriendRunner can help you.

Contest

Since we’re talking about places and locations, see if you can identify the beautiful Georgian mansion featured here. This National Historical Landmark was built by a signer of the Declaration of Independence and was once (a long time ago) the workplace of Sericon Technology’s president. When you think you have the answer, let us know at contest@friendrunner.com. The first one to correctly answer will be featured on this page, and will enjoy worldwide fame from people who love testing Facebook apps. Extra credit if you can also provide the house’s coordinates.

Winner

 Dr. William M. Spears of Swarmotics has correctly identified Homewood House on the campus of The Johns Hopkins University as our mystery location. He’s also noted its coordinates as 39°19′46″N 76°37′9″W, as well as adding his personal comment that it is a “Good frisbee and tanning location (i.e., the ‘beach’).”

Congratulations and good work William!

Graph API?? Graph API!!

A few months ago, Facebook announced the new Graph API at their f8 conference. At the time, we were so excited about it we immediately posted something.

If you haven’t looked at it yet, the Graph API is a much simpler way to write Facebook applications when compared to Facebook’s “Classic” RESTful API. To understand the Graph API you only need to understand a handful of logical and internally consistent concepts, and then put those concepts together to build a powerful application. This is in sharp contrast to the classic way to build Facebook apps where nothing is consistent, and new features from Facebook simply look like patches on top of other patches. Since the new API is so simple and language agnostic, we’re even starting to see many libraries released in every conceivable language to make development that much easier.

For us here at FriendRunner, the Graph API brings yet another challange. We not only need to understand how the Graph API works from the application side, but we also need to support it from the Facebook side. Since FriendRunner effectively replaces the Facebook server, we need to support everything that it does. We’ve even had a few customers that we’ve had to turn away because they’re some of the cool kids who’ve started using the Graph API. We have to apologize and tell them that “FriendRunner doesn’t support the Graph API.”.

Until now.

We’re happy to report that FriendRunner can now be used to test your Facebook apps developed with the Graph API. Building this was not easy, as the API is simple yet vast. There’s a lot of ground that it covers, and to really be compliant, we need to support it all. And not just support it – we need to support it scalably so that we can run load tests off of it. Not only is our Graph API scalable, but we’ve hooked it into our Advanced Monitoring system so that it’s provably scalable.

We’re really proud of this work as it’s a major feature that would put FriendRunner light years ahead of the other Facebook app testing platforms if there were other Facebook app testing platforms. So if you’ve been building your Graph API app and were worried about how you can properly load test it, FriendRunner has you covered.

Hyper-viral Facebook Applications

Are you planning on writing a Facebook application that will go really viral and have millions of users? Do you avoid discussing the number of users you think your app will attract for fear that people will think you’re crazy? Then this is for you.

Facebook recently updated their Developer Principles & Polices document to deal with applications that have huge numbers of users or make lots of API calls to the Facebook server. This document, which your application needs to meet the requirements of, contains a short section (II.11) about very popular applications. It now states:

If you exceed, or plan to exceed, any of the following thresholds please contact us as you may be subject to additional terms: (>5M MAU) or (>100M API calls per day) or (>50M impressions per day).

Clearly, they’re concerned about large and popular applications overwhelming their infrastructure, and want to deal with them proactively. It isn’t commonly known what Facebook’s additional terms are that large applications need to meet, but it’s certainly reasonable for them to exist.

So what’s the FriendRunner connection? Well, if you’ve got more than five million active users, congratulations, but you’re going to have to abide by the additional Facebook rules. However, if you don’t have that number of users but you’re pushing against the hundred million API call limit, FriendRunner can possibly help. One of the things that FriendRunner does well is allow you to profile and debug the API calls that your application makes to the Facebook server. If unnecessary or redundant calls are being made, FriendRunner can help you find them to decrease your use of the Facebook server and possibly avoid any additional terms that you must meet.

FriendRunner adds Advanced Monitoring

One of the first things taught to medical students is Primum non nocere, which roughly translates into First, do no harm. This is understood to mean that it’s better to do nothing than to treat a patient in a way that you do more damage than good, or put another way: Don’t let the cure be worse than the illness.

So what does this have to do with FriendRunner? Lots – in fact it was the inspiration for our latest feature that you don’t even get to see since it works behind the scenes, but will be thankful it’s there. To understand why, you need to think about the two jobs that FriendRunner performs:

1. Calls the test application in the same way that Facebook would so the application can experience the load. While doing this, FriendRunner monitors the time it takes the application to respond to determine its health. (Steps 2 and 5 in the diagram below)
2. Allows the application to call the FriendRunner ”proxy” Facebook server to service any Facebook API calls that the application needs to make. (Steps 3 and 4 in the diagram below)

That’s really all that FriendRunner does. These two functions act together to form a system that can put enough load on the test application so we can learn something meaningful, and hopefully make the application more scalable and better.

But what about FriendRunner? What happens when it gets large loads put on it? Once we start running with a few thousand virtual users, will the proxy Facebook server be able to satisfy API requests fast enough? And what if it can’t? Well, that’s pretty easy to answer: a poorly performing API will result in poor performance at the test application level. In other words, FriendRunner (the tool used to measure an app’s performance) will be the reason that the app being tested exhibits poor performance.

This is the stuff that keeps us up at night. However, in reality, things really aren’t so bad. FriendRunner’s server that replies to API calls is not a single server, but a collection of state-less scalable servers deployed onto a computing infrastructure with almost infinite expandability. It’s very unlikely that it would ever be the cause of a problem and make an application under test appear to be slowing down. Yet, we still think about these things to ensure that our customers get our best service.

Our initial attempts to allay these concerns were to simply monitor the servers that the FriendRunner software ran on. We’d monitor the health of the computers, and watch the memory and CPU usage. This works pretty well at the macro level, but still doesn’t really say what happens at the individual call level. The server’s memory may be doing just fine, but we still may be affecting the performance of the application under test. Truthfully, we’ve never seen any evidence of this, but it still weighs heavy on us. Remember: First, do no harm. We take our customers very seriously, and don’t want to be the cause of misinformation.

Which brings us to our latest feature, Advanced Monitoring. We’ve now instrumented our Facebook API server so that we can measure the performance of the FriendRunner server at the API call level to prove that the system acts consistently. And that’s a very important point to this whole process – we aren’t interested in measuring our performance because we want to make it faster. No, we measure to prove consistency – something that’s very important when measuring the performance of another system. Our calls should return in about the same amount of time regardless of whether there are ten or ten thousand users running in the system. That’s a difficult standard to live up to, and not only do we do it, but Advanced Monitoring can now prove that this is what happens.

Unfortunately, despite this very sophisticated system working very well, there’s really nothing that you, the user, can see. But we’ll sleep much better at night knowing that FriendRunner is not doing any harm. And you … well, you should be happy that FriendRunner will always provide you with a large and consistent load so that testing and tuning your application is as simple as possible.

Hobsons chooses FriendRunner

We are pleased to announce that one of our first customers has gone live with its application! mySchools by Hobsons is a new Facebook application that was released a few weeks ago. This innovative tool is designed to help students find the most suitable school to attend.
 
It was very exciting for us to start using FriendRunner on an app that was mission critical to the company that developed it. We validated a number of our assumptions, and learned a bit more about the information that we can generate to be of maximum use to our customers.

To learn more about how FriendRunner helped Hobsons and can also help your application, please click here.
 
Stay tuned, Hobsons is only the first customer story we can let you know about. We have more successes that we’ll be announcing soon.