Facebook Platform Development Setup

I've been playing around with the newly released developer features from Facebook. Since it's quite difficult debugging FBML from a remote server, I've come up with the following setup.

I'm using Ruby on Rails to develop a simple Poll application. Since I don't want to have to upload my work every time I'm going to test it, I've decided that during development, I'll run the server locally.

Your Facebook application needs to request information from your server. Since my IP changes once in a while, I registered it with DynDNS, and gave it a hostname. I then set up port-forwarding on port 3000 of my router to head to port 3000 of my laptop.

Now, when Facebook makes a request to http://myurl.homeunix.net:3000/, it goes to my IP, which is served to my laptop. The joy of this is that you can see the debugging output from your server instance, which is very helpful, as Facebook does not really print out debugging information.

Peace out, homies.