API Client Library Support

As most of you no doubt have noticed, Facebook Platform has been evolving at a very rapid pace ever since its release. The result of this evolution is a constantly growing list of features and functionality we're working on in order to improve both the experience of users of Facebook Platform as well as the experience for each of you, our developers.

In order to best focus our attention, however, we've made a number of decisions in the recent past to enable you with the power to help us in many aspects of Facebook Platform- for instance, providing direct feedback through our Bug Tracker, sharing knowledge as a community on the Forum, and assisting in the maintenance of the official documentation for Facebook Platform: our Wiki. In addition, there has a great deal of enthusiasm regarding Platform application development in a huge array of programming languages, resulting in the creation of numerous unofficial client libraries.

To this end, 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 Facebook Platform experience for users and developers alike.