Graph API?? Graph API!!

A few months ago, Facebook announced the new Graph API at their f8 conference. At the time, we were so excited about it we immediately posted something.

If you haven’t looked at it yet, the Graph API is a much simpler way to write Facebook applications when compared to Facebook’s “Classic” RESTful API. To understand the Graph API you only need to understand a handful of logical and internally consistent concepts, and then put those concepts together to build a powerful application. This is in sharp contrast to the classic way to build Facebook apps where nothing is consistent, and new features from Facebook simply look like patches on top of other patches. Since the new API is so simple and language agnostic, we’re even starting to see many libraries released in every conceivable language to make development that much easier.

For us here at FriendRunner, the Graph API brings yet another challange. We not only need to understand how the Graph API works from the application side, but we also need to support it from the Facebook side. Since FriendRunner effectively replaces the Facebook server, we need to support everything that it does. We’ve even had a few customers that we’ve had to turn away because they’re some of the cool kids who’ve started using the Graph API. We have to apologize and tell them that “FriendRunner doesn’t support the Graph API.”.

Until now.

We’re happy to report that FriendRunner can now be used to test your Facebook apps developed with the Graph API. Building this was not easy, as the API is simple yet vast. There’s a lot of ground that it covers, and to really be compliant, we need to support it all. And not just support it – we need to support it scalably so that we can run load tests off of it. Not only is our Graph API scalable, but we’ve hooked it into our Advanced Monitoring system so that it’s provably scalable.

We’re really proud of this work as it’s a major feature that would put FriendRunner light years ahead of the other Facebook app testing platforms if there were other Facebook app testing platforms. So if you’ve been building your Graph API app and were worried about how you can properly load test it, FriendRunner has you covered.