Following Tuesday’s weekly platform update, Facebook has decided to stop offering support for the official Facebook Java client library. Java developers will have to instead rely on the community-driven libraries. So what does this mean for the average developer? Not much unless you are using Java to communicate with Facebook. You will have to update your library on a weekly basis to keep up with all of the regular updates being made to the platform. There were few details provided, but here is what Facebook did say:
We have decided to discontinue support for our official Java client library, and rely on the existing community-driven libraries to fill this gap. While we understand this may have an impact on some developers, we feel that it is most important to keep working on our list of initiatives I referred to before, instead of maintaining an additional client library of which the developer community has already built several unofficial versions.
After this Tuesday’s push, the official Java client library will no longer be available for download from any of the developers pages. We encourage all developers who are interested in continuing to develop in Java to consider some of the open source alternative client libraries listed on the Wiki here. While the official Java library should have no immediate problems with continued use, we nevertheless recommend that you use a client library that is kept up to date, in order to best take advantage of any new functionality that is added in the future.
We appreciate all of the effort and time that you’ve invested in working with us, and apologize to anyone that this change inconveniences. However, we hope you recognize that this is being done with our main goal in mind- improving the overall Platform experience for users and developers alike.
Personally, I hadn’t been working with the Java libraries on a regular basis but I know of a few applications that have. For those applications it now means that the developers will have to keep up to date on absolutely all changes taking place on the platform and modify their existing libraries as necessary. It will be a headache for some but not for most. I’m glad that I’m not one of the many Java developers on the platform!
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Garh. No, there aren't a lot of us Java developers — just the people who are trying to develop the sort of sticky, high-end, seriously *useful* apps that they claim to want.This is a very short-sighted decision, IMO. We can live with it, but it's yet another distressingly contradictory message from FB…
Comment by Mark Waks — May 5, 2008 @ 7:55 am
Garh. No, there aren't a lot of us Java developers — just the people who are trying to develop the sort of sticky, high-end, seriously *useful* apps that they claim to want.
This is a very short-sighted decision, IMO. We can live with it, but it's yet another distressingly contradictory message from FB…
Comment by Mark Waks — May 5, 2008 @ 8:55 am
I also believe this is a step in the wrong direction. Most serious programmers want to use high level fourth generation compiled programming languages. Java is probably the best one for highly available serious web applications. However, the Facebook Java client library was bad at best. In the applications that we wrote, we wrote our own library. It isn't that difficult and it allows you to have control of the entire application. I guess their thought is if someone is capable of programming scalable Java applications, they can write their own libraries. So it doesn't hurt that they dropped support of the client library, but it is a bad sign for the ecosystem. It is the serious programmers that are going to drive Facebook applications to the next level and Facebook seems uninterested in building the ecosystem necessary to support these companies and developers.
Comment by Joe Jablonski — May 5, 2008 @ 10:07 am
I also believe this is a step in the wrong direction. Most serious programmers want to use high level fourth generation compiled programming languages. Java is probably the best one for highly available serious web applications. However, the Facebook Java client library was bad at best. In the applications that we wrote, we wrote our own library. It isn’t that difficult and it allows you to have control of the entire application. I guess their thought is if someone is capable of programming scalable Java applications, they can write their own libraries. So it doesn’t hurt that they dropped support of the client library, but it is a bad sign for the ecosystem. It is the serious programmers that are going to drive Facebook applications to the next level and Facebook seems uninterested in building the ecosystem necessary to support these companies and developers.
Comment by Joe Jablonski — May 5, 2008 @ 2:07 pm
Actually, the 'official' Java library has been out-of-date for some time.There's been an open source alternative that volunteers have maintained instead:http://code.google.com/p/facebook-java-api/Effectively, the open source version has been the one to use for some time, so this doesn't really change much.Clearly, Facebook is aware of this and that's why they've stopped linking their own out-of-date version. Why they haven't explained the alternative is anyone's guess. They do like to keep their distance from the community… couldn't be seen to know about individual developers' efforts!
Comment by Dan Lester — May 5, 2008 @ 3:22 pm
Actually, the 'official' Java library has been out-of-date for some time.
There's been an open source alternative that volunteers have maintained instead:
http://code.google.com/p/facebook-java-api/
Effectively, the open source version has been the one to use for some time, so this doesn't really change much.
Clearly, Facebook is aware of this and that's why they've stopped linking their own out-of-date version. Why they haven't explained the alternative is anyone's guess. They do like to keep their distance from the community… couldn't be seen to know about individual developers' efforts!
Comment by Dan Lester — May 5, 2008 @ 4:22 pm