Re:Best practices for REST API design (2020)
by jrockway on Monday February 22, 2021 @12:48PM
(#26227607)
I think people like it because the popular frontend library (Apollo) makes certain things easy in React, like caching.
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.
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.