Facebook betas Android SDK revamp

The new native Friend Picker UI
Source: Facebook Describing it as a major update that maintains backwards compatibility, Facebook has announced a beta for version 3.0 of its SDK for Android. It has also opened a Android Dev Center to bring all its Android resources together.

The new SDK adds several pre-built Fragments and Views with built-in caching and on-demand loading support that can handle picking friends, places, profile pictures, login and app permissions. It also includes tools to simplify session management, with a session managing Fragment and Button that save state in SharedPreferences and can serialise sessions in low memory situations.

The updated SDK also includes the ability to batch Facebook API calls for faster access times. MVC-style programming is better supported with callbacks and listeners for the API calls too, and a strongly-typed interface for returned Facebook JSON data should reduce coding errors, according to the SDK developers. Finally, the SDK now adds the ability to measure clicks and installs from mobile ads. The new SDK beta is available to download from the project's GitHub repository and is licensed under the Apache 2.0 Licence.

The new Android Dev Center includes getting started guides, tutorials for various aspects of the SDK, an explanation of the concepts behind the Facebook API and reference documentation and sample code. Facebook asks for feedback through its Stack Overflow page.

(djwm)