Making Facebook Platform Better, Faster, Stronger

Facebook Platform has come a long way in the two years since its launch. What started out as a small collection of API methods allowing our developers to integrate some user information into their applications has evolved into a comprehensive set of tools and products that have enabled you to create hundreds of thousands of innovative, engaging experiences on Facebook and across the Web.

We strongly value Platform quality and performance. As Platform has evolved and its code base become more complex, we need to make sure that it performs robustly so that your applications continue to deliver rewarding experiences to users. To do this, as we announced last night, we're undertaking our first major refactoring of Facebook Platform code. Our goal is to provide you with a faster and more reliable code base, as well as a more robust environment where you can build your applications. This process will continue throughout the upcoming weeks, and we intend to complete the refactoring in mid-September.

You don't have to modify anything in your applications and sites to accommodate these changes. All of these changes are happening on our back end, here at Facebook. As we modify the code, we'll verify it against our suite of unit tests before we release the code publicly. We built these unit tests to validate new code before it gets pushed. Once a given set of code is ready, we'll roll it out during our weekly push cycle, which happens on Tuesday nights, Pacific time.

You can keep track of which API methods we're updating each week on the Developer Wiki. If you notice any issues affecting your applications that you think are due to these changes, please file a bug.

We'll also keep a close eye on the Developer Forum and the #facebook IRC channel throughout this process, so please leave your feedback there. We hope you're as excited by these quality improvements as we are!