Excuse me what's the point of GraphQL as a primary middleware/middleware protocol? I can get the use case of consolidating a number of existing "REST" services to reduce service roundtrips with HTTP/1.1 or layering problems with HTTP/2.0 or QUIC, but it's not like nobody warned against use of the "REST" spaghetti antipattern, including Roy Fielding who coined the term. So JSON and XML (de-)serialization is natively supported by browsers, but what has GraphQL going for it when you need a browser client lib for it anyway? Why not just use a regular endpoint for JSON or XML; their use isn't tied to an opinionated "REST" interpretation at all and you could just send arbitrary payloads. Or is it just because, like React, GraphQL is advertised with all the strength of the media powerhouse that is Facebook in the end?
IMO GraphQL is a far better API framework than anything REST or "REST-lite"
1. Since GraphQL is always strongly typed, it serves as the perfect contract-definition layer between front-ends and back-ends. A common pattern is to define all your endpoints with the type definition language, then expose mock endpoints that the front-end team can code against while the back-ends team implements. In practice this works much better than anything I've ever done with REST tooling.
2. The strong typing also guarantees that many classes of mistakes and errors (and potential security holes) never even make it to your running resolver code.
3. GraphQL really excels where you may have clients outside of your control running against older versions of your API. A big original impetus for developing GraphQL was supporting native mobile clients, where all clients can't be updated in tandem with the server like a web-app can. Since the client always sends the full shape of the query they're executing, it's easy to evolve endpoints slowly: just add new fields or endpoints to your schema, @deprecate the old fields, but older clients can use those deprecated fields until they can migrate onto the newer fields. Backwards compatibility is never free, but again, in practice I've found this works much better than maintaining and potentially transforming between different explicit versions of REST APIs.
4. The tooling is simply fantastic. GraphiQL/GraphQL playground are leaps and bounds beyond something like Swagger.
There are other reasons but those are some of the highlights for me.
Appreciate your response. This sounds exactly what SOAP is like, then, and also what OpenAPI/JSON schema are attempting to do (only SOAP/WSDL also adds auth, transactions, discoverability, language mappings, schema evolution, and a couple other things). My post surely wasn't meant to defend "REST" or Swagger of all things :); more like, the industry has delivered one middleware standard after another in the last 20 years since "web services" became a thing, and arguably even earlier (CORBA). So it wasn't quite clear for me where this enthusiasm was coming from all along. Please don't be offended, but your answer confirms my suspicion that GraphQL is introducing an age-old concept to a new audience that was raised in the naive "REST all the things" mood of the last decade.
From the other answers, I get there's additional practical functionality like generic sorting and filtering in a GraphQL endpoint, though as a fullstack but mostly backend guy I'm puzzled how that's supposed to work without pushing the query criteria including sorting/offset/limit down to a DB in a hands-off way without a backend team implementing it.
You're right. GraphQL definitely seems like that. There are a few nuances though:
1. GraphQL is like SOAP for JSON. JSON is important to lot of developers today, especially the frontend/javascript ecosystem
2. GraphQL also helps developers think of data as related entities in a way that fits JSON. Nested objects and arrays essentially, but not ad-hoc. Hence a "schema" of your "graph" that describes the API.
3. GraphQL has a construct called fragments that makes it easy to declare data-dependencies at a UI component level that are then automatically composed together into a single query by graphql client tooling (at build time ideally). This can be done with JSON as well, but the ergonomics with GraphQL are nicer.
None of these are truly "new" ideas perhaps. But I think all of it coming together is new.
That said, the complexity of building and maintaining a GraphQL server is definitely non-trivial in the real world. For example, health-check tools often rely on HTTP status codes in responses to check service and API health. This doesn't work well with GraphQL because GraphQL supports partial errors and responses, and the error itself is embedded inside the response. This means analysis the response is necessary. This means that the privilege required for the health-check tooling is greater. Responses should not be logged or analysed by third party services without taking a lot of explicit care.
I worked extensively with SOAP in the early 00s. I hated every living minute of having to deal with SOAP (completely overcomplicated, bad tooling), and I love programming with GraphQL.
At my previous job GraphQL was considered because the frontend team was poorly served by the API exposed by the backend team. Everything was available, but the frontend needed to join, filter, sort and and adapt it in all kinds of ways for different UI. The backend team was too busy to provide the same data in different shapes, so the frontend had to do this manually. Of course they wrote their own code to do this all the time, but what they would rather have spent their time on was UX and business logic.
> when you need a browser client lib for it anyway?
You don't need a browser client library to execute GraphQL queries on the frontend, it's just a POST request with a query string and a parameter for variables.
It's just easier and more convenient to work with.
I want xyz data. I query for xyz data. Single request.
I want to provide abc data. I put abc data in the database and expose it (don't have to write another separate endpoint plus all the related relationships). Now I can query for ranges, filter, etc. in a single request.
