Facebook v4 Plugin: Android Beta

24 July 2015

Facebook v4 Plugin: Android Beta

Since Facebook released version 4.4.0 of their SDK and deprecated Graph API v1.0, many of you have been asking for us to upgrade, and provide new features to our facebook plugin.

We are releasing a new facebook-v4 plugin built on top of Facebook SDK v4.4.0!

Currently this plugin is in beta and is currently available on Android only as we’re finishing up the iOS side.

Download Corona daily build 2015.2685 (or later) to get started.

What about the old Facebook plugin?

The facebook-v4 plugin supercedes the old facebook plugin. Consequently, we are deprecating the old facebook plugin. While it will still be available, Corona will no longer be supporting it or providing any maintenance updates to it.

The main reason is because Facebook will deprecate Graph API v2.1 on October 30, 2016, and the old facebook plugin depends on that API.

Therefore, we recommend migrating to the facebook-v4 plugin, as it will soon be required.

New features

For this initial release, we’ve provided some new APIs that improve developer and user experience with login.

In particular, one popular request has been saving login info in a better manner. To address this, we now provide the AccessToken for a logged in user through facebook.currentAccessToken. This property is updated inside the plugin, so managing access tokens is no longer the responsibility of the Corona developer!

Upgrading to Facebook v4

With the new facebook plugin, we wanted to be sure that the migration process would be as painless as possible. This was accomplished by making the new plugin a nearly complete superset of the old one. We’ve maintained all the old APIs while adding new ones and new possibilities with old ones.

Outside of different responses you may get in the fbconnect event from facebook.request() and facebook.showDialog(), the rest of your facebook code should be backward-compatible!

For more detailed instructions on upgrading, see our migration guide.

Resources

More detail on the new plugin can be found in our docs.

Feel free to discuss the new plugin on the Facebook v4 forum.