GraphQL

I don't expect many upvotes on this post as GraphQL advocates are very very passionate. In fact I've never seen someone advocate so strongly for REST as they do GraphQL. I'm still going to risk my Karma and say it, I prefer REST.

GraphQL is great at first. When I started working with GraphQL I thought it was amazing. I've even given conference sessions discussing GraphQL and the benefits it brings. At the time, I was only consuming GraphQL APIs. From a consumption standpoint, it does get benefits.

Running a GraphQL server brings a completely new perspective. This is why the pain points in the state of GraphQL report all revolve around performance, security, caching, etc. () which are all items that REST does very well.

I'm starting to think the best approach is to build APIs as REST, but then use something like Netlify Connect () to then allow front-end developers to choose GraphQL where desired.

I have also heard analysts and other professionals start calling out GraphQL as a niche solution. One that will stick around, but will not replace REST.

What is your opinion? Do you use GraphQL or REST or something else entirely?

GraphQL was created by Facebook in 2012 for the sole purpose of improving performance on mobile wireless connections. The history is well known, with plenty of presentations from the creators.

In 2012 for the US the average home connection speed was 6.7Mbps, wireless connections (3g) maxed out at 1-3mbps download and less than 1 upload.

Today the average home connection is 119Mbps and mobile 23Mbps.

Mobile internet speeds are faster than home connections when GraphQL was invented. With GraphQL servers being significantly harder to optimize for performance and requests being more difficult to cache, I'm starting to question if GraphQL can still claim to be faster.

Add in the other issues DOS attacks exploiting query complexity, difficulties in securing data, and how much harder it is to host a GraphQL server, and I'm starting to worry about the future of the technology.

It's only one data point, but StackOverflow trends show a leveling off for GraphQL -

I took the time to learn GraphQL and enjoy it as a technology. Since its creation, it's added other benefits beyond speed. So I'm asking the community, would you consider using GraphQL for a future project? Where do you see GraphQL going?

Hi everyone

I have dabbled with GraphQL and used it for my to see what all the hype is about. It allows you to fetch only the necessary data you need I get it. However, the challenge is that, when a new property is created on the backend. In such cases, I have to explicitly add that property to the query, for instance.:

    services(locale: $locale, pagination: { limit: 100 }) {
      data {
        attributes {
          title
          text
          showcase
          backgroundColor
          icon {
            name
            brands
          }
        }
      }
    }

I use Apollo. Makes me a bit frustrated that I have to rely on third party packages to implement Gql easier. With REST I only have to rely on built in fetch(). Let's say I have just added the "showcase" property in Strapi, which is a Headless CMS built on Node.js. I need to include that property in the query mentioned above as well. As a result, the query file becomes quite verbose, spanning over a thousand lines. The verbosity of GraphQL in this scenario has made me question whether using REST calls instead would have been a better option. Do you believe this issue can be solved while still using GraphQL? What do you think? You always need to put a new property inside the query every time you create new data on the backend. This isn't the case in REST, You just put

const response = await fetch('https://api.example.com/posts');
const data = await response.json();

and you get everything from posts automatically. Of course you should also consider error handling with try catch for example but the REST code above is minimum.

For Gql you have to write like this:

  const { data } = await client.query({
    query: GET_SERVICES,
    variables: { locale: [locale] },
  });

And afterwards you need to implement a query like mentioned above. And then who knows you need to change it constantly later on.

The main advantage of GraphQL I can think of is the ability to fetch data from a complex tree of nodes and relationships using a single network request.

How has your experience with GQL been so far?

Hello guys, I'm a TypeScript developer and have been fascinated by the performance of Go with GraphQL. However, I noticed that the go-graphql library is not maintained. After some research, I tried using gqlgen, but I didn't like it—it felt cumbersome for creating an MVP. Are people still using GraphQL with Go? If so, how are you using it?

I'm a newbie to Elixir and started learning the basic syntax. My company is using Elixir and Phoenix and I need to learn quick simultaneously phoenix + absinthe + graphQL. I have used various other programming language and web framework.

I cannot wait until I master Elixir to learn phoenix + absinthe + graphQL.

What are some of the best books or websites I can learn it fast track?

I'm looking at revamping a side project. It's a GraphQL backend with React on the frontend, and I'm likely going to end up using Electron. I'm not sure what the modern version of Apollo is in Go nowadays. What would you recommend? Would prefer to do it with the more common option vs something new, if that makes sense. And yes, this project is partly to pad my resume.

I'm at a large company in the retail space and theres no graphql being used yet in my organization. I want to know your guys' experience with it and if it's worth pursuing for a large enterprise, albeit it's not a tech-first org. I'm in a data API team and I have been working on understanding the data models in our data warehouse (snowflake) and existing APIs / use cases which serve data to various domains in the org. I have been reading that this client driven approach is better for intial proof of concepts, to bring those existing use cases and then to simplify and expand upon that dataset. Ultimately, a finished product would expose almost all data from the warehouse to be used by anyone authorized. and I feel that the answer to a lot of my question of is it worth it is "it depends", but I just want to hear from everyones' experience with graphql and see what I can learn from that.

I really like GraphQL, but is it worth it adding another layer to my sveltekit backend? Or should I just use some ORM (prisma) directly? I want to add native mobile apps too later, using the same api.