How I did the application for vkontakte

I have long wanted to create a product that would be useful to people. I myself a flasher. I have been using vkontakte social network for a long time. Desire was strengthened by applications in Vkontakte, which, as a rule, were of entertaining nature. Then the idea was born to create a "harmonious couple", an application that is designed to help find the perfect partner among the users on vKontakte, based on the main parameter - the ascendant. In addition, it also takes into account the age and country of residence (you can take into account more parameters, but for now we limit ourselves to these).



A short pause - I publish this topic at the request of charly - raise him karma. :)))
')
After downloading the official examples of applications that used the VKontakte API, I started to work. As it turned out, creating a more or less serious application using only the API is rather complicated. And if this is a multi-user application, then the task becomes more complicated at times. In addition, the risk of data loss increases.

At that time, it was not possible to organize my database server, so I decided to use only the API.

Toward the end of the development of the application, I still came to the conclusion that you cannot do without a third-party server. I couldn’t implement the functions I needed using vkontakte’s standard tools, the volume of traffic between the application and vkontakte’s server would grow exponentially with the number of users.

I will give an example.

The data that was the result of the work of my application, I wrote in each user's own variables. It seemed to me that they can then be considered all together, just as it can be done with reading information on users.

- getProfiles. id xml

But access to personal variables is carried out only by one user. That is, for thousands of users need to make a thousand requests, and no more than 3 times per second.

Therefore, it was decided to use the server on which my site is hosted. And since I almost did not work with php and MySQL, I also had to learn how to link them together with Flash. As a result, after a few days, Flash had already sent requests to the database, and it responded with a certain amount of data.

When everything seemed to be ready, the contact prepared a new test. In order for the application to work fully (for example, open the pages of users on Facebook) - it must be checked by the Administration. The check took 4-5 days. But the application has not been approved. The administration referred to the violation of the rules for placing applications.

After reading the 15 points of this “guide”, I decided that the Administrations did not like banners that were spinning at the bottom of the program (although Durov himself wrote in a blog that the authors of the application can monetize them as they please). Removing links from banners and deleting googleAds (shown at the time of downloading the application) - again sent the application for review.

I was surprised when the application was approved the next day.

I think everyone knows what I felt at that moment. When your offspring, albeit small, goes to "independent swimming."

Tests with tests, but when the “Harmonious Couple” earned money on real people, several bugs came out. They were instantly corrected, but ... the unpleasant residue remained :)

Now the application works the second day, and I, in turn, try to advertise it. Introduced new features (such as rating, accrual of virtual money, horoscopes). Now some statistics are available to me on the users of my application, but since there are still few users, I think that there is no sense in such statistics. Later I will unsubscribe and tell who uses the "harmonious pair."

Let's hope that at least someone will find their harmonious couple. So my work is not in vain.

PS If there is a desire to look at the application itself - write. :)))
PPS vkontakte.ru/app658626