Facebook Woes
posted in Technology, Developers, Facebook |Today I check the app I’ve been building and I get a spew of dozens of errors-
CSS Error (line 0 char 113): Expected end of value for property. Error in parsing value for property. Declaration dropped. CSS Error (line 0 char 114): Expected end of value for property. Error in parsing value for property. Declaration dropped. CSS Error (line 0 char 114): Expected end of value for property. Error in parsing value for property. Declaration dropped. CSS Error (line 0 char 114): Expected end of value for property. Error in parsing value for property. Declaration dropped.
I’m pretty sure its the way I’m setting the margin property which is valid CSS, but might not be the precise syntax they are expecting-
<div style=”margin: 10px 20px 0px 20px;”>
This goes back to the point that they can change the platform and how they parse FBML at any time and without warning break you. I wish they provided a “staging” server. The idea is that you can develop your app there, test it there, and any platform changes they do get rolled out at the staging server for at least a week before the move them to production (except of course for any fixes to exploits). This at least would give developers a fighting change of staying on top of this stuff.
The other big issue this brings up is the perception of the cause of the problem. I’ll give the Facebook folks some credit for using fairly neutral language in their text, but the implication is still that the problem is with the app developer. TechCrunch just ran a piece on Facebook apps and how many of them are failing to scale. Of course, the catch is that while many of these apps might be done by some non-professional folks on a shared hosting server that can’t handle the load, that is not necessarily the real story.
My app is running on a dedicated machine in a datacenter. The machine is a fairly high performance dual-core machine that is typically running at less than 5% usage. My uptime as recorded by various tools has been 99.86% for the past 8 months (with pretty much 99.99% for the past 3-4 months). I can hit my site directly and I never get a failed request. Yet when accessing my Facebook apps on the same machine I see the same error messages that TechCrunch is attributing to poorly designed unscalable apps.
There are lots of possible explinations. It could be a bug in the code of my app where it hangs somehow. Unlikely, but its possible. It could be a complex interaction in Facebook calling my server and then my server making callbacks to Facebook to server the request. But in any case something is turning out to be less than commercial-quality reliability and it doesn’t feel like its in my control.
Makes you think twice about exposing your brand to these kind of issues. I’m planning on following up with some other developers I know to see if they are encountering the same sort of things.