Question : PHP - How to incorporate PHP application into facebook?

Dear Mr.Expert,

I do appreciate for providing your valuable advices.
I am about to be engaged into a new project which is
to develop a PHP application and incorporate it into
FaceBook. That was what I heard for now from my boss.

PHP application (search/modify/delete/update sales items such as
clothes, shoes, sports gears, bicycles, beverages, golf and tennis gears,etc...)
 is to be built by PHP,OOP,MySQL,Java Scripts, XHTML, CSS,JQuery.

Then I have to incorporate that PHP program into FaceBook.

I have experience in above application development.

But the issue is that I have NEVER had experience in :

(1) incorporating that PHP application to FaceBook

(2) developing on the Facebook platform

Our server is running on Unix Platform.

If you have time, please advise any hints (or) tips (or) tutorial links
that explains how to do above two tasks.

This is a new challenge for me in this company
which develope variety of web applications.

Please adivse so I will have some idea.

Thank you for your attention and time...

Answer : PHP - How to incorporate PHP application into facebook?

I agree that there is no point in rewriting everything in PHP.  It wastes time, and time is money.

However, the two languages are similar.  After knowing Java for a couple of years, PHP was not hard at all, and I could still use either my NetBeans IDE or Eclipse IDE.  So, if you want your PHP developers to learn Java or your Java developers to learn PHP, this is not a problem in my opinion to worry about.  It'd be very easy.

There are a lot of great features about the PHP language:  typeless variables, heredoc syntax, readability, etc.  I would say some cons are less information and control over errors, not as good unicode support (if you're using other languages besides English), and less object-oriented design as Java (you can have classes, but it's still a lot more like C than C++ or Java).

Here's a link I found:
http://www.c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?PhpProsAndCons

I love PHP and Java, so it's hard to say really.  And like everyone has already said, with a large system, you can't beat the heavily object-oriented design of Java, while PHP shines in easiness, speed, and readability of the data going out/coming in (you can look at a PHP file and pretty much know what it will look like).