On PHPBuilder.com today there's a tutorial introducing you to OAuth and how to use it in your PHP applications.

Oauth is an open standard for authorization that allows secure authorization from web, mobile and desktop applications. This standard allows a third-party application to gain access to a HTTP service, i.e. it enables users to share their resources from one website with another website without having to give out their credentials (usually username and password). [...] Oauth authorization is carried out in 3 steps: obtain a request token, authorize request token and exchange request token for an access token.

They introduce you to some of the basic concepts behind OAuth and how the process works (complete with a handy graphic). They then show how to use OAuth to connect to the Facebook API, both in Javascript then PHP. This is followed with two other examples referencing popular social sites Twitter and Foursquare, hitting their APIs with simple authentication requests.

According to this new post on Nerds Central, there's been speculation that Facebook, needing even more of a performance boost than hiphop gave them, is moving into using PHP in a JVM.

The presence of Facebook engineers at the JVM Language Summit in San-Francisco along with their interest in implementing PHP using invoke-dynamic on the JVM is a the shock. The main seismic event will be nothing less than the complete removal of interpretors from main stream general purpose programming.

He talks some about the JVM environment (and the Magik project) as well as wondering about what sort of performance boost it might actually give.

So Are Facebook Doing The Right Thing? Yes! The rise and rise of Javascript over the last 4 years as shown us just how powerful JIT compilation of once interpreted languages can be. The fall and fail of complete re-writes has shown us just how unrealistic it is to completely move a working system from one language to another. Facebook has a stupid amount of PHP and so it is by far the most sensible thing to port that to mlvm. Actually it should be pretty easy.

The Server-Side Magazine site has posted an interview (10 questions) with Andrei Alexandrescu, a research engineer currently working at Facebook.

Today we caught up with Andrei Alexandrescu for a "10 Question" interview. He is a Romanian born research engineer at Facebook living in the US, you can contact him on his website erdani.com or @incomputable. We will talk about some of the juicy stuff that going on at Facebook, so let's get started.

Their questions include:

• What's your development setup?
• What do you think of PHP as a language from your perspective, regarding that Facebook was initially written in PHP then transformed to C++ using HipHop for PHP. What are the pros and cons of using C++ over PHP at Facebook?
• Currently, what kind of research do you conduct at Facebook? (or is this confidential?)
• Tell us a little bit about the D programming language, in contrast to C, PHP, Ruby and others. In what fields can someone apply D?
• Also, what kind of advice can you give for developers who are considering to apply to Facebook? What kind of skills is Facebook looking for in a potential candidate. Is it really important to be a graduate CS? What kind of skills do the majority of Facebook employees possess?

Read the full interview for his answers to these and other interesting questions.

New from the XPertDeveloper.com blog there's a tutorial showing how to use the Facebook graph API to get page details via a simple cURL request (cURL PHP support required for the example).

Here is the technique to get the detail of the Facebook page with Graph API and PHP. This is the very easy method to get the Facebook page detail. So Let's see how to get this done. With this method you can get details of any Facebook page [inluding] name, picture, link, website, products, description and if the user can post to it.

The sample code is only a few lines - it uses the Facebook page ID (easy to grab from the URL) and fetches a URL with it as a parameter. The output is returned as a standard PHP object with all of the properties attached (decoded from JSON). This is just one of many methods the Facebook graph API has, so check out their documentation for more methods and details on returned values.

On the NetTuts.com site today they have a (very complete) guide to help you wrangle the Facebook Graph API and make it useful for your application. It makes use of the official Facebook PHP SDK to interface with the Graph API.

Have you ever wanted to learn how to make your applications more social with Facebook? It's much easier than you think! In this tutorial, we'll be building an application that reads and publishes data to and from Facebook using Facebook's Graph API.

The tutorial helps you get signed up on the Facebook developer site, create a first sample application, set up the SDK and make a simple page (with an added bonus of using the Twitter Boostrap for look/feed). There's a section covering permissions, what kind of data you can expect publicly for both users and posts. They wrap it up with an example of posting back to Facebook though the API and updating the status on your account. The complete code for the tutorial is also available for download.

On DZone.com John Esposito reminds you about another technology Facebook has introduced to the world of PHP (besides HipHop) - XHProf, a PHP profiler.

Facebook did more for PHP: they also created XHProf, a PHP profiler with a (supposedly) easy-to-use HTML interface, designed to pinpoint exactly where your bottlenecks are appearing, so that you can optimize at every stage in the pipeline. [...] If you haven't tried XHProf, you might want to look into it. Installation apparently requires a little nudging, but Nick Lewis just posted a full, practical guide to benchmarking and performance tuning your PHP and MySQL, using XHProf (as well as other techniques) -- a very nice overview of many common bottlenecks and how to open them up.

There's also a link to some Drupal 6 benchmarks that shows how it has helped that project (including both small and large improvements).

On PHPBuilder.com there's a recent post showing you how to connect your application with Facebook's graph API and grabbing the current user's public profile information.

In recent years, [Facebook's] influence has dramatically grown thanks to the Facebook Platform, a set of APIs which third-parties can use to create or extend applications which tightly integrate with Facebook.com's features and users. [...] PHP-minded developers are particularly fortunate, as the Facebook PHP SDK doesn't only provide users a powerful solution for interacting with the social graph, but because it's actively maintained by the Facebook development team is often the first of several available APIs to offer the latest features and bug fixes.

He points out the github repostory for grabbing the Facebook SDK, the information you'd get (at a minimum) from the API and the sort of detail you can expect from a user logged into your application. Sample code is included for this last example.

On VentureBeat today there's a post (the first of two parts) looking at Facebook's involvement in Open Source software, including their work on HipHop and XHP for PHP (an interview with David Recordon and Amir Michael).

The social media company has, without question, taken the time to work on those projects. The hackers at Facebook have done perhaps more than any other single entity to advance and optimize PHP, the programming language on which the network is primarily built.

They talk about some of the projects, both PHP-related and not, that the developers of Facebook have either created or contributed to. There's mentions of Facebook's "hacker culture" and a mention of their workflow and how they decided on going forward with something like HipHop.

In his (Python) blog today Casey reminds the developer community about a handy tool that the developers at Facebook have made available to make a PHP coder's life easier - phpsh.

The developers at Facebook have brought PHP developers a powerful REPL now ala-Python to round out a solid toolbox that PHP developers already have. The project is called phpsh and is written in Python.

He includes the commands you'll need to get it pulled from github and working, providing you with an interactive shell right on your local machine (more powerful than the built-in PHP shell). You can also grab a zip or gzipped archive for download. For complete details on the tool and how to use it, see phpsh.org.

On DevShed today there's a new tutorial showing you how to integrate Facebook commenting with your PHP application via the Facebook Connect API.

Facebook comments are a great way to optimize your site for social media and add a level of user-engagement to you site. Quality website comments can increase your website's credibility, as well as its traffic. This tutorial will teach you how to use Facebook's API Connect to integrate comment boxes on your website in a few simple steps, utilizing a little PHP and some elbow grease.

You'll need to set up an application for your PHP app to make the connection. This will give you the unique keys for your application that'll be used in setting up the commenting. By including a Facebook javascript file, all you'll need to do is output a special "fb" HTML tag with the right attributes and a meta tag or two to configure it with your application's keys.