I’ve been using the RFacebook Gem and plugin for my latest facebook application. It works great and all, but the things I’ve read about it are very true. It’s really not very ‘ruby’. I like all the features and it’s not too hard to use, but I’m sure we can do better to integrate facebook and rails in a prettier way. I’m wondering if anyone wants to collaborate on a new gem or a new plugin that would make things more Ruby-ish.

A few things I would love to see would be some form of meta-programming that could map calls to something like Facebook::User.getInfo, instead of fbsession.user_getInfo. Just looks nicer. I’d also love to see some form of Active Record integration. The acts_as_facebook_user helper is great, but it still requires you to call manually call a facebook API call from your controller to get user information. It would be great to have something like User.facebook_info[:first_name] without any extra effort. Just something to take the facebook data portion out of the controller and put it where it belongs, in a model. Last, but not least, RFacebook compatibility to maintain applications until they can refactor to use the new methods.

Anyone who wants to help out with this, I’d love to get some type of plan written up and some good people working on it to get something working quickly and well. Let me know!