Uniface Facebook integration

Integration with social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube etc is hot. And Uniface is incorrectly perceived as old fashioned. This sample will show that is not difficult at all to integrate Social Media in your Uniface application. And to make it more interesting it shows you how to do that from your classic Uniface
desktop application.

Should we integrate these two very different worlds?
Like all other projects this should only depend on the specific business case and nothing else. Maybe your sales manager comes up with the idea that when a user adds a new product to your inventory, that should be automatically communicated to your customers over Twitter and on your Facebook page. If that gives a good expected return on investment it would be foolish not to build that functionality.

Can we integrate these two very different world?
Yes we can, as this sample will show. It will show you how to implement two important parts, the authentication mechanism and the Facebook API, from a Uniface Windows application.

Authentication
Facebook uses the OAuth 2.0 protocol. That is nice because it is also used by other websites, so we can reuse it. To implement the Facebook authentication in a Windows application you need an embedded browser. In Uniface we can create an embedded browser by using an OCX container with the Microsoft Webbrowser control. We make it navigate to a web page from Facebook. When the user is not logged in to Facebook, first a log in screen is shown, otherwise he/she immediately will be asked to give the application permission to access some of his/her data on Facebook. When the user gives permission the application receives a special key that we need to send with each API call.

Facebook API
The Graph API is the one that we can easily call from Uniface. This API can be implemented in HTTP requests using the Uniface UHTTP component. In this sample we keep it simple, just a simple Uniface Form where you can type a message that will be posted on your Facebook wall.

Uniface Social Media Integration

Uniface systems are traditionally large systems used by bigger companies for their internal administrative processes. And Social Media is all about sharing information and experiences on the Web. So where is the connection?

The connection is in Social Media Marketing. This is a very broad concept and the word Marketing is a bit misleading. It is about getting in touch with your customers, communicating with them, improving the customer experience and your brand identity. And in the process your sales will increase. And if you do it right your customer support costs will go down.
An interesting book to read is The Social Media Bible by Lon Safko.

For example, you sell products. In your enterprise application you discount the price of a certain product. You could post this automatically to your companies Facebook page, with a link to your web shop.

Or when you are an insurance company you could scan your database for a specific target audience, try to find these people on FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc and invite them to watch a YouTube video that is interesting for them.

A lot of this possible in the current Uniface 9.4. I just finished a Proof of Concept for integrating Uniface desktop applications with the Facebook API and it works very nice. The biggest hurdle to take was to implement the authorization mechanism. Facebook uses the upcoming OAuth 2.0 standard for that, and many more sites are starting to use this standard so now they should also be easy to connect too.

Over the next weeks I will make a sample so Uniface developers can take a look at how we did it.

PS
Go visit the iCU2011 on May 10th a preview of Uniface 9.5. With the new JavaScript options yet another world of web application integration opens up. And have a chat at the Uniface Services booth about your ideas for integrating Uniface applications with Social Media.