Local development - FBML vs. iframe

I’m trying to develop locally on my Windows machine. I followed the instructions on setting up a reverse ssh tunnel, and everything seems to be in order, but I keep on ending up with a blank canvas page. According to the facebook developers wiki at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/FAQ

“If you have configured your canvas to use FBML, then make sure that you are accessing an externally available server. Facebook’s servers cannot access “localhost” or an internal IP address.
If you do want to develop using localhost, you can do so by configuring to use an iframe.”

Although I am an experienced scripter, I’m rather new at this type of web development, and I’d really like to use FBML as recommended in the book to ease my way. Do I have to get ahold of a separate development machine so I can use FBML, or must I alternately use iframe when developing locally, or am I missing something?

Honestly – from what I’ve found you’re better off going out and setting up a free account with dyndns, and then configuring the port mapping on your router to point to your machine running mongrel – I map port 80 (default web port) to 3000 (default mongrel port). Then in my app setup on facebook, I point the config at my dnynds domain. Make sense?

It’s not quite ready for prime time, but we have a service that can make this a little easier. Check out http://tunnlr.com

Feel free to sign up for an account. Things are working for us and the service will likely be launched within the next two week.

Let us know if that solves your problems.

I set up an account at http://tunnlr.com, and followed the instructions to modify my facebooker.yml file. When I run

rake facebooker:tunnel:background_start

I get

Starting tunnel ssh1.tunnlr.com:xxxxx to 0.0.0:3000
The system cannot find the path specified.

(xxxx being the public port number)

Any ideas on what’s wrong here?

Typo: it was actually 0.0.0.0:3000

It sounds like you don’t have ssh installed on your machine.

You can find instructions on how to use the tunnlr plugin at http://tunnlr.com/about then click on “Instructions for Rails” If you still have problems, send an email to support@tunnlr.com

Thanks, I think I’ve got it.

I was a bit confused. As I’m using facebooker with rails, I used the tunnel command in the facebooker section of the instructions, which gave me the error:

rake facebooker:tunnel:background_start

So instead I used the command in the rails instructions:

rake tunnlr:start

This is giving me the proper tunnel that I have set up in the facebooker.yml file. Perhaps the facebooker Tunnlr doc could be updated, so the user is instructed to use the second command if using facebooker together with rails.