Bebo Development Scares Me

Today at work, we’ve begun looking into creating some Bebo applications.  I know it’s a bit behind in the times, but we’ve been busy with Facebook, iPhone, and Google Gadgets.  It’s now time to sink our teeth into Bebo.

I spent about 30 minutes setting up Bebo and reviewing a simple three step process to setup external authentication and it didn’t work!  Not only that, when I went to download the API I had to actually right-click and choose “Save As” because it just loaded the whole API as text in my browser.  Talk about a shotty setup.

The API download problems aside, let me tell you more about my authentication problem.  The three step example I followed is from this URL here: http://www.bebo.com/docs/auth

*** I apoligize if any of the code below is incorrect, I’m typing by memory on this one ***

So, I begin by instatiating the Bebo API:

$bebo = new Bebo($apikey, $secretkey);

Next, I get an auth token like the instructions say:

$token = $bebo->create_authToken();

Now, I create a link that goes to the login.php page on Bebo.  I do as they say and pass in my API key and auth token.  I also pass in a next URL.

On the page where my next URL is, I re-instatiate the Bebo client and I get the auth token from the URL.  And like step 3 says I get the session:

$session = $bebo->auth_getSession($_GET[‘auth_token’]);
print_r($session);

Great, all set according to the three steps.  So I load the first page in my browser and click the link.  I’m now directed to the Bebo login page.  I log in with my username and password.  I now need to give access to my application.  There is also a checkbox on this page, that is not clear, but I assume it to be the “infinite session” they keep talking about.  It’s checked by default, so I leave it as is and press the “Yes” button.

After all of this I get redirected back to my “next” page that I specified and my print_r of session reveals that “the app is not visible to me”????  Not sure WTF this means.  I continue tinkering around for a bit and I randomly decided to uncheck the “infinite session” checkbox and press yes.  Guess what, it worked, now I have a valid session.

I’m now thinking that, ok, it’s not going to be such a big deal because I remember reading about an option to hide the checkbox.  I go and update my link to add hide_checkbox=true.  Try the process all over again.  Guess what?  The checkbox is still there…

At this point I’m at a loss and we will make a decision tomorrow about whether to continue with Bebo, because it does not look promising so far.

If anyone has encountered something similar and solved it, let me know, I would be grateful.