Hey everyone,

Wooooooooo!

Happy birthday to Koala!  The first version of the gem was released exactly one year ago today, and boy has time flown.  It seems like just yesterday that Koala was 0.4, crawling along with just Graph API support; now, all of the sudden, it’s fully-featured, stable, and one of the most popular Ruby gems for Facebook.  *sniffle*  They grow up so fast!

Since today is Koala’s birthday and all, it seems like a good day to announce that Koala 1.0 has been released. As of today, you can now do everything with Koala that can be done on Facebook: quickly, securely, and, perhaps, with style.

1.0 Features

Koala 1.0 includes massive improvements to almost every part of the gem, giving you new features and more control over existing tools.  Here are the big changes:

  • Photo and file uploads
  • Additional get/put/delete accessor methods to cover all Graph API use cases
  • Support for Facebook’s beta tier
  • Better control over how HTTP requests are made
  • Speed improvements (using http for public requests and api-read where possible)
  • Completely rewritten, faster test suite

Plus a lot more — check out the changelog for the complete list of updates, and the documentation for up-to-date instructions and guidance.

Credits

Over the last year, Koala has become one of the most popular gems for the Facebook API (a close second in downloads and a solid first in Github watchers).  Chris and I want acknowledge, as we hit 1.0, that Koala would be where it is were it not for its awesome user community.  The changelog is a history of improvements both big and small that came via pull request.

We want, in particular, to thank

  • rjacoby, whose advice shaped the gem in its first days and who contributed the test users module
  • fractallian, who contributed the realtime updates module
  • joshk, who refactored Koala’s test suite into a modern, fast machine
  • jtarchie, whose contributions to Typhoeus allowed us to offer photo uploads
  • Everyone at Context Optional for their support and feedback
  • lshepard, without whose challenge to port the Facebook Python SDK to Ruby by the end of last year’s F8 conference none of us would be reading this today
  • waseem, rickyc, pulsd, kbighorse, spiegela, netbe, gilles, imajes, jagthedrummer, and thhermansen, for their patches (if I left anyone out, please let me know)

We’re excited to see others build on top of Koala, like Eukaliptus, a new open-source project from the seasonlabs team that will make it easy to integrate Facebook into a web project using Koala.  We’re putting together a Wiki list of apps and projects using Koala — if you’d like to be on there, just just send us an email or a Github message!

Getting 1.0

Enough talk, let’s install!  To get Koala 1.0, just run

sudo gem install koala

Or add it to your Gemfile:

gem "koala"

Easy.

The Future

Facebook never sleeps, so neither do we: we’re already at work on 1.1, which will introduce Batch Requests, better live tests, and more.

We love to hear your feedback — if you have questions, check out the Koala Users’ Group; if you have a patch, send along a pull request; and if you find a bug, just open up an issue.

That’s it!  Have a great Sunday and enjoy Koala 1.0!

Best,

Alex and Chris (the Koala Team)
https://github.com/arsduo/koala

PS The very professional-looking partying Koala image was captured in nature created using these Creative Commons-licensed works, and is therefore itself available under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license: koala, party hat, noisemaker.