Greetings Joyent Facebook Developer:
Here are the bullet points on why we are writing you. Please read further below for more details.
- Your Facebook application running on the Joyent Cloud Free Facebook Developer Program may no longer work after October 1 due to changes in Facebook’s security policies
- Your application and data are safe to transfer for the foreseeable future
- There are several upgrade paths available for your apps:
- If you are not actually running your app on Facebook, then you can transition to Joyent’s free No.de platform.
- For all mobile applications including games, Joyent has partnered with StackMob to deliver you a feature rich platform.
- If you plan to continue running your app on Facebook, then you can upgrade to a dedicated Joyent Cloud account on our new platform for less than 9¢/hr running SmartOS, Linux or Windows.
- And as always we will continue working on new ways to support the development community for the Facebook platform.
Here are the technical details.
Back in May, Facebook announced their plan to improve overall site security by transitioning authentication to OAuth 2.0 and moving to HTTPS for secure browsing. All externally served sites and apps running on Facebook must migrate to OAuth 2.0, process the signed request parameter, and obtain an SSL certificate by October 1, 2011. The migration to OAuth 2.0 will also end support for fb_sig. (For more information, read Facebook’s Signed Request Reference Guide - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/signed_request/.)
Unfortunately, SSL adds additional requirements upon application developers of all sizes with Facebook. In order to run your website via https, you must have 1) a registered dns, and 2) a dedicated IP address to serve that traffic. Unfortunately, our free developer program cannot meet the criteria for the dedicated IP addresses. Thus, it is likely that your application, if running live on our free program, will no longer be accessible without SSL through Facebook as of October 1.
So what are your options? You may continue to use the Joyent Cloud free developer service for the time being but applications on that service will not longer have access to Facebook. Joyent Cloud will be determining the future of the program over the next few months. We would advise all users running production Facebooks apps, to check out our new cloud offering at www.joyentcloud.com which includes the lowest market hourly pricing options and allows developers to run Linux, Windows or SmartOS Joyent Machine Images (JMIs). New capabilities include a robust public API that can incorporate SSH keys and cloud analytics (from New Relic and Joyent Cloud Analytics). These analytics tools offer total transparency and easy troubleshooting of cloud processes from the CPU to the kernel to the application stack
For those of you who are not using Joyent Cloud’s Facebook Developer Program for a production application, feel free to check out our no.de service, which offers free Node.js SmartMachines for application development. No.de cannot run production Facebook applications but can easily accommodate non-production applications.
It has been a terrific four years helping to cultivate and launch some of today’s premier Facebook applications and working with so many interesting and exciting companies. We hope to continue supporting your application development efforts and are available anytime at sales@joyent.com if you need help architecting for the Facebook changes.
Best Regards,
The Joyent Team
