foursquare and facebook graph integrated mobile application

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Case Study

FourSquare and Facebook Graph Integrated

Mobile Application

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Client Requirement

The client demanded a search application which totally integrates with Facebook. The application

is database-centric. When the user logs in to the system through Facebook it extracts user data

(excluding the private data) and stores it into its own database. The user profile is then

automatically created through this information.

The application is highly robust and capable of storing the user’s likes, interests, friends and

other activities. It also enables the user to search information in the database. The application is

a middleware and includes the following sections:

Log In: The user can log-in to the application only through their Facebook accounts.

My Account: The user can manage and edit their account or profile from this section. They can

also apply access specifiers to each part of the information. There are three modes of access i.e

Private, Public and Broadcast.

The information which is “Private” will not be visible in the user search whereas “Public” part of

the information will be easily available to everyone accessing the application. The information

specified under the “Broadcast” category will be visible to only those users who share similar

interests or have shared the same information under the “Broadcast” category. Therefore,

Broadcast can be called as a semi-public access specifier.

Filter User: This section allow user to apply filters in order to search other users and based on

the filter the search results will be displayed according to the relationship status, age range,

gender, near me and nearby places.

Message: Once the users are selected they can message each other and maintain a messaging

thread.

The application provides Foursquare location service integration. The users can check in to their

favorite locations, write reviews and recommendations and avail discounts too.

Project Challenges

Team faced the following challenges:

Creating an entire architecture of the system including the UI, visualization and flow

of the application.

Maintaining the Foursquare check-in location for each logged-in user and having a

cron job run at the server end to update the checked-in location every hour.

Comparing the user profiles at the database-end to maintain the profile ranking for

the user keyword search.

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Technologies Used

Manpower

Planning

Keeping in mind the enormous communication with the social networking platform, SDKs like

Facebook and Foursquare were used. The challenges involved a MVC (Model View Controller)

development approach that consisted of a design pattern in which the model, the view and the

controller are separated in such a manner that modifying either the view or model component of

the program has no effect on one another.

Development Highlights

This application for iPhone was built around Objective C and almost all the other modules were

developed using foundation, core graphics and UIKIT frameworks. All the user interface

components were placed in view controllers using interface builder. The view controllers were

linked with the controller files project along with the outlets and actions of the UI element. To

import the user liked pages, interests, activities and profile information we make use of the

Facebook Graph API. To maintain the details of the user last checked-in location and to show the

user nearby location as per the current location, we used Foursquare API.

Operating System &

Server Management

iOS, Multi-Server Architecture with Staging & Production

Environment through Version Controlling releases, Server

Optimization, Security & SSL Implementation, Scheduler for Back-ups,

Alert Monitoring System Integration, Server Performance Tuning at

regular intervals, Software Firewall Configuration & Maintenance

Development Tools &

Environments

Xcode 4.2.1, Facebook Graph API, iOS SDK, Foursquare API, Objective

C, Core Data Framework etc.

Database SQLite Database Server, DB Clustering, DB Optimization, Master

Slave Replication, Query Optimization, Scheduler for Backups

Project Leader

1

Developers

2

Quality Assurance Testers

1

foursquare and facebook graph integrated mobile application

Technology