What happened to all the documentation??

[roise_r]

What happened to all the documentation (JavaDocs) on the TwitterApi and FacebookApi after the release of Spring Social 1.0.0.RC1???

[Keith Donald]

Relax, take a deep breath, no need for extreme punctuation. The Twitter and Facebook bindings were split out from the core project. The links are on the main project page, but perhaps not as clear as they should be. We'll make things clearer; in the mean time, here is a link to the JavaDoc API and Reference for each project. All of this stuff is also included in the download distribution for each project.

API

Spring Social | http://static.springsource.org/spring-social/docs/1.0.x/api/
Spring Social Twitter | http://static.springsource.org/spring-social-twitter/docs/1.0.x/api/
Spring Social Facebook | http://static.springsource.org/spring-social-facebook/docs/1.0.x/api/

Reference

Spring Social | http://static.springsource.org/spring-social/docs/1.0.x/reference/html/
Spring Social Twitter | http://static.springsource.org/spring-social-twitter/docs/1.0.x/reference/html/
Spring Social Facebook | http://static.springsource.org/spring-social-facebook/docs/1.0.x/reference/html/

[roise_r]

nice! thanks you. I use extreme punctuation in general :). I'll try to keep in down.

just a quick clarification: the Twitter and Facebook APIs are implemented by their dev teams. Spring Social just includes them in the org.springframework.social package ?

[Keith Donald]

Re: clarification: No, the Spring Social team has implemented the Twitter and Facebook bindings. The community maintains them with our help. We hope to have the support of Twitter and Facebook themselves in the future, once 1.0 is out. Having these bindings as a separate projects allows them to evolve independently with their own release schedule.

Keith

p.s. the APIs are actually linked on the project page, just not terribly obvious. Where were you looking by chance?

[roise_r]

what about the GraphApi? Is it implemented by Spring as well?

It is pretty obvious the location of the material you linked here. It is just that I need to spend a little more time scanning pages rather then asking on forums. I had the TwitterApi on a bookmark and when i when back to it, it just pointed to the social api with no more twitter and facebook and i though you guys forgot to link the docs back.

[Keith Donald]

Technically speaking, the provider (Facebook) implements their API. The Spring Social community implements a API *binding* in Java. Yes, the binding to the Facebook GraphApi was implemented by us.

[roise_r]

api binding. hmmm.. would it be too much trouble if you briefly explain what an Api Binding is? From google i got that it is language independent but that is it.
My specific question is: when i use the methods of GraphApi, for example: post(), are they implemented by Spring or by Facebook devs? meaning are they SpringSocial user dependent or i can use the GraphApi directly from Facebook where the methods would be the same as those of springsocial.api.facebook?

[Keith Donald]

Our Facebook.class calls the remote Facebook Graph API, which is hosted on Facebook's servers and implemented by the Facebook dev team. It allows you to easily invoke the Facebook API, implemented by the Facebook dev team, from Java. It's a "Java binding, or client interface, to the Facebook API"

[roise_r]

so the actual methods are written by facebook, thus they are the same if i start using facebookApi directly and not via springsocial?

[Keith Donald]

The remote web service API is implemented by Facebook. The Java client binding to that API is written by us. You can write your own client if you want, but you'll be doing a lot of work we already do for you. Facebook as a company does not provide a Java client binding to their API--they do provide a JavaScript client, and I believe PHP and Python clients.

Alright, hopefully this is all clear now. If not, just look at the code of spring-social-facebook and it should become clear (you'll see how the binding is implemented, what it does, and the @author tags that indicate we developed it).

Keith

[roise_r]

thanks a lot. Sorry if I was a bit of a pain. I can understand the API and use it well, I just dont get when does the connection to facebook actaully happen. But its clear now.