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new-tools-to-help-you-build-better

April 12, 2016ByVivek Hamirwasia

We've heard feedback from many of you about ways we can make it easier to build with Facebook. Today, we are launching new tools and updates that make it easier to develop and maintain apps on our platform.

Localized Technical Documentation

More than 70% of Facebook developers are located outside the U.S. As we talked with you over the past year, we heard that you spend time translating our technical and product documents into your own language. To help you focus on building your products and to make it easier to build great apps on our platform, we're making the documentation for your most popular products available in 16 languages. To view these docs, you can change the language selector for developers.facebook.com on your home page.

New App Dashboard

The App Dashboard is where developers come to configure Facebook developer products, submit apps for review, and monitor the health of API calls and errors. We are beginning to roll out a new version of the App Dashboard that is simpler to navigate and use. The dashboard is now more contextual and customized to each app, so it's easier for you to find information you're looking for based on the products your app has integrated with.

Rate Limiting

Rate Limiting on the Graph API helps us provide consistent and reliable service to all developers building with Facebook. With more transparency around how we throttle, you can take action to avoid reaching the limits that impact the availability of your app. We're providing new charts on your App Dashboard that visualize your app's progress towards the rate limits and allows you to explore specific API calls contributing to your app's usage. Now, you will also see a notification when your app is nearing limits. Additionally, we are changing the way rate limits work for Page management apps so that limits are relative to the number of people engaging with a Page - this will take effect 90 days from today.

API Upgrade Tool

We are constantly improving the Graph API and with each new version, we are offering new products and features. To deliver on stability, we have committed to supporting each version of the API on our Core APIs for at least two years. Today, we are releasing the API Upgrade Tool to make upgrading your apps to the latest API version easier. Provide the tool with your App Name and API version, and the tool will list the endpoints your app is calling and how they will behave in the target version.

We are always listening on Facebook Developer Community group and look forward to hearing any feedback on these new tools and how else we can make building Facebook easier.