<p>I have looked in vain for a good example or starting point to write a java based facebook application...  I was hoping that someone here would know of one.  As well, I hear that facebook will no longer support their java API is this true and if yes does that mean that we should no longer use java to write facebook apps??</p>

Facebook stopped supporting the official Java API on 5 May 2008 according to their
developer wiki
.
In no way does that mean you shouldn't use Java any more to write FB apps. There are several alternative Java approaches outlined on the wiki.
You might also want to check
this project
out; however, it only came out a few days ago so YMMV.