Facebook delivers a beta release of its software development kit (SDK) for Android.
Facebook has delivered a beta release of its software development kit (SDK)
for Android.
The Facebook development team demonstrated the beta at the
Google I/O developer
conference in San Francisco May 19-20.
The new SDK enables strong authentication using OAuth 2.0, making requests to
the new
Facebook Graph API,
publishing stories back to Facebook via Feed forms.
In a post describing the new SDK, Steven Soneff, an engineering intern on
the Facebook Mobile Platform team, said the library is very simple. With only a
few lines of Java, your application can become social.
Android is Google's rapidly emerging smartphone operating system that some
analysts believe will
rival
the top-selling Symbian OS for the top spot in the market. Worldwide
shipments of smartphones will surpass 390 million units by 2013, predicts IDC,
with the two most popular mobile operating systems being Symbian and the
Android platform.
Hoping to capitalize on that momentum, Facebook released its SDK for
Android.
"Over 100 million people use Facebook on their mobile phones every
month, and Android is one of the fastest growing mobile platforms," Soneff
said. "We're open-sourcing tools and example code that make it simple for
the thousands of Android developers to integrate Facebook Platform into their
applications and reach a large and ever-growing mobile audience."
Facebook's Graph API, introduced at the
Facebook F8 developer conference in April, attempts to drastically simplify the
way developers read and write data to Facebook. It presents a simple, consistent
view of the Facebook social graph, uniformly representing objects in the graph
(e.g., people, photos, events and fan pages) and the connections between them
(e.g., friend relationships, shared content and photo tags).
To get started with the
Facebook SDK for
Android, download it from GitHub.
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