The words “Apps” or applications are strictly used in computer world in the old days. It mainly referred to practical computer applications that requires a lot of complex programming. However the word “Apps” is widely used on the Internet nowadays. There are a lot of Apps available to download on the Apple platform. Most the “Apps” are actually plain documents that do not require any programming skill. Actually even a simple map can be an App. Therefore we need to adjust our mindset or definition about “Apps” to suit the modern Internet world – an App can be complex computer programming, or as simple as a text document. Ha ha… anybody can create “Apps” nowadays.

Similarly a Facebook App can also be a plain HTML documents , or a HTML document embedding a Flash animation that enough to wow….. most visitors, or some programming skill that integrate with Facebook Graph API.

Facebook Pages Listing

The Facebook Pages Listing is a good place to inspire your idea in making Facebook Pages and Apps. You can find a lot of Facebook Pages of famous brands (Coca-Cola, Sony, etc.) and celebrities (Mr. Bean, Lady Gaga, etc.) at Facebook Pages Listing:

http://www.facebook.com/pages

Create a Plain HTML Facebook App

For most App on the Internet that add to the tab of Facebook Pages are simply HTML documents that requires no any programming skill. This is the most easiest way to build an App. In fact it does not require any programming technique of using the Facebook Graph API. Today, I am going to build a simple Facebook App with HTML documents only.

We already specified the Page Tab URL of the created Page in previous post.

Actually a Page Tab URL specify the page that will be loaded when a visitor click on the Tab on a given Facebook Page.

Use any FTP client to upload some web pages (HTML documents) to the specified Page Tab URL.

When visitors click on the Tab of the Facebook Page, the specified page (tab.php) will be loaded within the Facebook iframe, as shown below:

The concept can be shown in the diagram below:

In this example, the Facebook App can has more than one page. Visitors can navigate between the pages, for example, the Domain Name page:

Live Demo:

The address of the example Facebook Page and Facebook App is:

http://www.facebook.com/MyGreatNameHosting

As you can see, a Facebook App can be as simple as just plain HTML documents or web pages.

For a more interesting and complicated App, it requires to integrate with the Facebook Graph API.