Monthly Archives: August 2008

New breeds of Search Engines – Cuil, Powerset, etc.

Just saw the interview with Cuil’s founders. The videos are at:

In those videos, they talked about how they came up with original ideas for Cuil and taking the leap to start another search engine company? They also said how competition helps to advance technology and make the market more efficient. It is quite encouraging to see high-technology continues to evolve in a lackluster post-dotcom economy.

After viewing those videos, I gave both Powerset and Cuil search engines a try. While Cuil is quite similar to the old Google and reveals very few innovations, Powerset is a definitely a cool tool and something I will be using more often in the future. The idea of using natural language to enhance the searching experience will open door to a tremendous amount of new opportunities. There is also another search engine called Mohalo, which I have not had time to play around.

Meanwhile, I am continuing to work on my peer-to-peer commerce application: http://myfairtrade.are4.us. In the last few days, I have narrowed down the focus for this application, created a sketch of the business plan, and made up several mockup screen shots showing my vision – including providing AJAX (inline screen refresh) etc. Additionally, I also got the application integrated with Facebook through iFrame. More news and screenshots to come soon….

Building FaceBook application with Zend Framework

Facebook is quickly becoming the leading social network website. It offers a complete set of APIs for third party application development.

I decided to give it a try and built a test application using PHP & Zend Framework. My application is a very simple application consisted of 2 Controllers – IndexController & RegisterController. IndexController is my home page. And, the RegisterController is responsible for user registration functions.

When I deployed my test app as a Facebook Application.

Deploying a Facebook Application
Detailed Facebook App Setup

Then, I discovered a mismatch between Zend Framework and Facebook application setup. Apparently, Facebook acts an application gateway for client applications. There are two format for the client application.
1. FBML – FaceBook Markup Language, The client application contains Facebook specific tags which will be transformed by the Facebook gateway dynamically at run time and enable tight integration between the client application and Facebook host. However, if my or application is build using Zend Framework. Facebook gateway does not correctly rewrite URL and renders your application useless. This is a mismatch between Facebook Gateway server and Zend Frameworks / Apache rewrite directive. Additionally, Facebook Canvas (FBML setup) limits the maximum number of included Javascripts to four. Furthermore, JQuery Javascript library does not work under the FBML setup, limiting amount of cool user interface possibilities within the browser. Also, cannot use <input type=’image’ src=’relative url’/>
2. iFrame – You application will be displayed inside a Framework within the browser containing Facebook page. This addressed the Gateway problem. Now, you can use FBML in iFrame application, which means my application could not tightly integrate with Facebook. If you are using Zend Framework, this is the better approach, because FBML setup causes problem with URL rewrite rule. Hook to call new Facebook(secret, api, true) must use True, indicating generate session key, which is necessary to get direct URL access correctly. Otherwise, logging out of the apps.facebook.com/appname will not destroy the session on the access through direct URL.

Do anyone know a workaround this issue?