Just over a year ago, Quinton announced the first beta release of the Force.com Toolkit for Facebook, an Apex Code library allowing Force.com applications to read social data from Facebook via the Facebook Graph API.

That first version was quickly followed by an update adding the ability to create posts, comments, likes and more. Despite the ‘beta’ tag, those releases saw rapid uptake, with hundreds of downloads of the unmanaged package, not to mention several forks of the GitHub project. Today I’m pleased to rip the beta tag off with a third release!

This new version allows you to write a social application for Facebook in Apex Code and deploy it as a Force.com Site, a customer portal or even a Visualforce page running in an org. The code is pretty much rewritten from the ground up to take advantage of the native System.JSON classes introduced back in Winter ’12 and the new Spring ’12 Authentication Provider feature.

The getting started guide is also completely rewritten, with a worked example showing how a simple game can leverage the players’ social graphs. Go take a look, and get started writing your first social application, on Force.com!