Re:Graphcool – Serverless GraphQL Back End
by andrewingram on Wednesday May 17, 2017 @05:37AM
(#14356877)
I think "half-assed" is rather harsh. As far as i'm concerned, GraphQL is revolutionising front-end component-based development, and solving a large number of API/platform issues.
It's not an exaggeration to say that rarely a day goes by when I don't overhear a conversation describing a problem that simply wouldn't exist if they were using GraphQL. It's not a new idea, there's a lot of prior art, but GraphQL is starting to gain serious traction - with a lot of big name adopters.
You're right in that Graphcool is essentially a GraphQL-server-as-a-service, personally I don't have any use for it, but i'm glad it exists.
https://code.facebook.com/posts/1691455094417024/graphql-a-d...
It would appear it's a half-assed string-based, semi-structured ddl / query-language aiming to be a middleware between actual data storage and thin clients, presenting legacy data as a graph (rather than, say, a (filesystem-like) tree or a relational table structure). Surprisingly the responses are json while the queries, as far as I can tell, cannot be parsed as js/json - but look very similar.
Based on that, I gather this is firebase with a graphql front-end: a db-as-a-service with no clear path to move off of if needed? (compared to, say, sql-server as a service).
Perhaps harsh, but at least put like that I think both the value-proposition and trade-off is more obvious?
Assuming I understood it correctly, of course. Corrections welcome.