You want to know how to halve your performance and responses/s on your service? add graphql.
All things that GraphQL claims to do can be implemented in RESTful services easily.
If you want specificity in your query fetching, just add query params or put them in the request body
If you want schema validations, there are many libraries that help you with that.
And if you want data from multiple resources from different endpoints, what exactly is stopping you from implementing that in REST?
Also, GraphQL has a steeper learning curve as opposed to REST.
never understood graphql. To me its just an abstract layer between the front end and back end, adding to the already complex stack.
From a backend perspective, it's about 100x more work than dumb RPC (which I prefer over "REST"). I have spent so much time becoming aware of very "interesting" decisions. For example, gqlgen for Go generates code that fetches every element of a slice in parallel. We used to create one database transaction per HTTP request, but you can't do this with GraphQL, because it fetches each row of the database in a separate goroutine, and that is not something you can do with database transactions. It's also exceedingly inefficient.
All in all, it's clear to me that GraphQL is built with the mindset that you are reaching out to an external service to fetch every piece of data. That makes a lot of sense in certain use cases, but makes less sense if you are just building a CRUD app that talks to a single database.
I am hoping that people get bored with this and make gRPC/Web not require a terabyte of Javascript to be sent to the client. RPCs are so easy. Call a function with an argument. Receive a return value and status code. Easy. Boring. It's perfect.
With GraphQL, you're just pushing N+1 calls and figuring out the mental contortion needed to support all the graphy-ness from non-graph structures. Most that say GraphQL is the bees-knees must be an FE developer. There's nothing wrong with that, but GraphQL is just NOT as cracked up to be.
Eg: Hasura.
https://hasura.io/blog/architecture-of-a-high-performance-gr...
How do you easily write an endpoint that can either return a comment, a comment with its children, a comment with its corresponding story, with a strongly typed schema (ie. no optional children or story whatever the query is)?
it's not hard.
In my specific case, using Flask-Marshmallow i can do this
```
some_resource = Resource.find_by_id(resource_id)
arg = request.args.get('type_of_resource')
if arg == 'with_commments':
return full_resource_schema.dump(some_resource), 200
if arg == 'no_comments':
return no_comments_schema.dump(some_resource), 200
there i just implemented graphql in 6 lines of code
Dare i even say switching to graphql and onboarding developers to graphql is a much more resource intensive process than adding another endpoint (or a couple).
As a BE/remote I basically taught myself most of elixir's graphQL framework in a day (wait, that was yesterday), while under feature pressure (due this afternoon), mostly by poking around and doing a bit of TDD. There are parts that I really hate about graphQL, but overall I consider it a win.
Instead of doing a simple GET /a/b/1/c and presenting that data structure, they now need to define a query, think about what resources to pull into that query etc. If the query ends up being slow, they have to understand why and work on more complex changes than simply asking the BE team for a smaller response with a few query params.
We quickly realized that expecting them to learn our data model and how to use it efficiently would be much more complicated than exposing every plausible use-case explicitly. We could do this on the "API front-end" by building a set of high-level utilities that would embed the GraphQL queries, but that would essentially double much of the work being done in the front-end (and more than double if some customers want to use Python scripting while others want JS and others want TCL or Perl).
So, we decided that the best place to expose those high-level abstractions is exactly the REST API, where it is maximally re-usable.
Most API teams will give you all the resources that you need.
It is most likely the case that the FE team will ask not for more, but rather, for less.
This was the exact problem why GraphQl was created in the first place - to account for Facebook's mobile platform, because they were receiving way too much data that needed to be trimmed because they didn't want to be sending like 500kb of json over mobile networks.
Competent API teams will give you all the resources that you need to be productive as a FE engineer, and if it is the case that your data needs some trimming, then go ahead and ask your decoupled backend team, while you can go ahead and keep working asynchronously while they get that done for you.
Not Fatal as you think it is.
Graphql works the same way if i'm not mistaken.
and if its the case that you don't want the comments at all, then in the conditionals write your sql statements
if you want comments
select * from resource where id=some resource id
if you don't
select without comments from resource where id=some resource id
there's no need to get into specifics, the point is graphql is not bringing anything novel. everything it claims to do can be implemented in RESt if you're willing to implement it.
With a REST API, the “resource” type will always have an optional “comments” field, whatever the value of arg is.
With a GraphQL API you’ll have the right type depending on your query.
In general, the tooling/spec has thousands of open bugs, isnt going anywhere, moves very slowly and is missing fundamental features.
https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification/issues/1998 heres the ticket where it will inevitably be ignored and die. But even if it was supported in the spec, the open source generators wont support it anyways.
Said generators also uses "logic less" templates to generate something that very much needs logic. As a FE dev, I love nothing more than to fork a an archaic Java based generator to get the client gen working...not.
So if you wanted comments you would send a request with a header like "Accept: application/resource_with_comments", and you'd send a Header like "Accept: application/resource_without_comments".
The thing is, few people want this level of control in practice. This would generally lead to a huge proliferation of types for very little practical benefit. Much simpler to have a set of well-defined types with optional fields than to define a new type for each combination of fields used today.
- some fields of the resource - some fields of the comments - some fields of the user that made the comments
API consumers definitely aren't the ones who should be thinking about something like joining behavior, since GraphQL doesn't give nearly enough control to achieve performant joining.
Basic filtering can also be easily achieved with ad-hoc methods, such as query params. No need for a full-blown GraphQL language server in front of all your services.
At least, this has been our experience with B2B software sales.
Of course, YMMV depending on market etc.
Your API should match semantic actions on your client like the UI and it needs to do this in such a way that it happens in one database transaction.
With REST, new UI requirement that needs to save 2 objects together across multiple entity types...? GG.
The TL;DR of that blog is this. There isn't much value that GQL can provide over REST + OpenAPI. GQL is still in its infancy so APM is easier with REST. The biggest argument for GQL is returning the right amount of data but GQL is slightly slower than REST because the server is having to parse what is essentially a mini program with every request.
In my experence therefore, the tooing (code gen, doc gen) etc around OpenAPI is piss poor in comparison to gql. Just look at GraphIQL compared to postman.
GraphQL has first class support for this scenario.
The whole point of an API is to decouple. GraphQL does the exact opposite.
...may not be the advertising you think it is.
I believe that treating RESTful APIs as a smart data storage that can do advanced querying is a mistake, or rather REST is not the proper solution for this use case, and you did well to move on from it. Personally I've never failed to use REST successfully as long as I was willing to do proper caching, sorting and filtering in the API consumer. REST is plenty if you need presenting collections of things with key-set pagination and proper caching headers.
In the days of HTTP2+, it's easy to fire 100 concurrent requests to a key-set RESTFUL API and load all the data that you could ever need. :)
- Accept and respond with JSON: No, why? what if I want to work with XML? or format X or Y?
- Use nouns instead of verbs in endpoint paths: I don't care about that
- Name collections with plural nouns: I don't care about that
- Nesting resources for hierarchical objects: No, why?
- Handle errors gracefully and return standard error codes: nothing to do with REST specifically.
- Allow filtering, sorting, and pagination: yes, good luck coming up with the right query structure and sticking to it.
- Maintain Good Security Practices: nothing to do with REST specifically.
- Versioning our APIs: And here we are. How many HATEOAS people claimed it was blasphemy and it missed the point of REST?
None of these are an issue with GraphQL, just like they weren't an issue with SOAP. You get a schema both the client and the server must agree with, end of story.
As I said to a dev once, if your 'best practices' can't be automated with a CI tool, then you need to worry about creating that tool first...