Facebook now allows you to create test users for application development purposes. That doesn’t sound too dramatic in and of itself, but up to now it’s been necessary to create dummy accounts and (technically) violate the terms of service.

Creating new test accounts is a two stage process: firstly obtaining an access token for the application with which the account is to be associated; and then creating the account itself. Both are done via the Graph API, which is trivial enough with a bit of command line foo courtesy of the curl command.

XHP is a PHP extension which augments the syntax of the language such that XML document fragments become valid PHP expressions.