Facebook Query Language

Facebook developed its own language that allows you to select user information from an API called Facebook Query Language (FQL). If you have worked with SQL before, FQL will be quite familiar to you. When the Facebook platform first launched, there were a total of nine tables that you could query to return information for your application, now there are 60! If you find yourself making multiple Graph API calls in order to get the data needed for your application, the FQL API will help you decrease the number of calls to the Graph API and get you the specific information you need for your application.

At a very simple level, you select elements from the object table. For example, if you want to query the Event table for information about a particular event, you may write something along the lines of Listing 8–20 as your FQL: