Today’s post is a little more technical than I have been, but it’s an important milestone for the Ringside Social App Server. In our Beta2 drop (available via SourceForge), we have introduced preliminary support for Facebook JavaScript (FBJS). FBJS enables Facebook (and now Ringside) applications to use Web 2.0 functionality like Ajax and DHTML to provide better user experiences. As far as I know, we are the first and only implementation of FBJS outside of Facebook! Here are the key pieces of the implementation we released today:

• Many of the DOM extensions (APIs to get and set properties for DHTML)
• The Ajax object (primarily to support getting new FBML from the back-end application)
• The DOM extension setInnerFBML, allowing applications to generate FBML as the Ajax response and to dynamically update the UI with that FBML

We expect this implementation to mature between now and our next beta release, which should come out in about 2 weeks. But what we have today is enough to run the Voomaxer Facebook application on the Moorestown Running Co. site. If you try it out and find something lacking, let me know, or consider contributing the our open source social platform.