3 comments

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  Mark Waks

  7 months ago

  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...
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  Joe Jablonski

  7 months ago

  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.
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  Dan Lester

  7 months ago

  Actually, the 'official' Java library has been out-of-date for some time.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  Clearly, Facebook is aware of this and that's why they've stopped linking their own out-of-date version.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!
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