We use a number of technologies in this chapter, mainly revolving around the Ruby programming language and its various libraries. Most of them have been described in Chapter 1. In addition to Ruby and its libraries we also use mashups, which are described next.
As with previous chapters, while the main features in the applications are all implemented within the chapters itself, sometimes we still depend on other services provided by other providers. In this chapter we use four such external services—RPX for user web authentication, Gravatar for avatar services, Amazon Web Services S3 for photo storage, and Facebook Connect for reaching out to users on Facebook. RPX, Gravatar, and AWS S3 have been explained in previous chapters.
Facebook has a number of technologies and APIs used to interact and integrate with their platform, and Facebook Connect is one of them. Facebook Connect is a set of APIs that let users bring their identity and information into the application itself. We use Facebook Connect in this chapter to send out requests to a user's friends, inviting them to join our social network. The steps to integrate with Facebook Connect are detailed in Chapter 6,
Note that for the user invitation feature, once a user has logged in through Facebook with RPX, he is considered to have logged into Facebook Connect and therefore can send invitations immediately without logging in again.