July 2016 Summaries

GraphQL is being proposed as a best practice for modern Angular apps due to its ability to provide efficient data fetching, reduce network latency, and enable real-time communication patterns. The current REST protocol used in Angular apps has limitations such as lack of self-documentation, inability to support real-time data fetching, over-fetching, and under-fetching. GraphQL addresses these issues by allowing the client to specify exactly what data it needs, reducing unnecessary requests, and enabling faster initial loading with server-side rendering. By adopting GraphQL, the Angular community can benefit from sharing knowledge and tools with the React community, and improve the overall performance and maintainability of their apps.

Apollo Client is a GraphQL client that allows developers to work with any front-end and any GraphQL spec-compliant server. It provides tools for working with mutations, including simple ways to update queries currently being watched and optimize UI updates. With optimistic UI, the application can simulate the result of a mutation by guessing what will happen and then validating the behavior with the server. The client normalizes results into a store to get benefits such as query caching and consistency across the store.

We recently improved the performance of our Meteor Galaxy UI by implementing Apollo Client and GraphQL, allowing for faster rendering of components and reduced server roundtrips. By eliminating no-op re-renders and implementing a simple scheduling system for polling queries that relies on Apollo's query batching, we significantly improved performance. Additionally, we aligned the polling intervals of multiple queries to batch them together in a single server roundtrip, reducing the number of requests made to the server. These improvements are now available starting with version 0.4.6 of Apollo Client and can be easily implemented by updating to this new version.