Facebook Graph API Explorer

If you follow the DevZone blog you know that I have a thing for development consoles.

They make my life easier by bootstrapping my use of new and changing APIs, especially in the prototyping phase.  What’s not to love?

Given my interest in consoles in general and my work with Facebook technologies including the Facebook Graph API in particular (see this post on the Graph API if you need a primer on the technology and the sorts of things you can do with it), I was delighted to come across a recent ProgrammableWeb article on a “semi-unofficial” Facebook Graph API Explorer.  Facebook Partner Engineer Simon Cross (@sicross) has built what is in effect a Graph API console to help you learn about and use Facebook’s API.

It seems a bit cleaner than the roughly comparable Apigee Facebook console (click here to see that console in action in an earlier blog post of mine), though of course Simon doesn’t have to provide consoles for other APIs besides Facebook’s so it might not be completely fair to compare Apigee’s to his.  Still, I like the streamlined look of Simon’s interface.  And I love the Explorer’s metadata section which provides very useful information on connections and fields for a given node.  For instance, here’s the output when one pulls up my account via a Graph API query:

Compare that to the same call in Apigee’s console:

Click here to read the complete post on the PayPal X Developer Network including a suggestion for improving the Explorer by taking a page from Apigee’s playback.