August 2016 Summaries

GraphQL is a query language designed to simplify API design and interaction, offering a more efficient way for clients to request specific data from servers. It's not a replacement for REST but rather an alternative that provides a standardized way of describing and querying APIs, making it easier for developers to work with and understand. GraphQL is built to be user-friendly, even for non-technical users, with tools like GraphiQL providing a straightforward interface for exploring data directly from the dashboard. Despite concerns about complexity, GraphQL's design enables easy querying, predictable responses, and compatibility with multiple backends and databases. Its adoption has been rapid, driven by its potential to revolutionize data sharing on the internet, and it continues to be developed and improved upon.

The release of GraphQL.js version 0.7 brings several exciting improvements to the schema language, including adding descriptions directly as comments in the GraphQL schema language and making it more convenient to create executable schemas. Additionally, there are changes to the naming convention for root types, new features such as separateOperations utility function that allows caching operations separately, and various fixes and breaking changes due to updates to default resolve functions and GraphQLError. These changes enhance the overall usability and performance of GraphQL.js, making it an even more powerful tool for building scalable and maintainable APIs.

The GraphQL community has experienced significant growth since its inception in 2012, with the technology being used by various companies and inspiring a collection of open source libraries. To showcase this growth, Apollo organized a meetup and conference, dubbed GraphQL Summit, which was launched to provide a platform for developers to share their experiences and learn from others in the community.

The application data graph is a fundamental concept in modern applications, where data can be represented as nodes and edges. GraphQL allows us to extract trees from the app data graph by defining root query types that specify where a query can start when traversing the graph. The tree structure of GraphQL lends itself well to client-side caching, with Apollo Client using assumptions such as "same path means same object" to reduce roundtrips to the server and improve application performance. Object identifiers are used to identify unique pieces of information in the app data graph, allowing for more efficient caching and updating of query result trees. By understanding these concepts, developers can leverage GraphQL and Apollo Client to build fast, snappy applications with improved reactivity and caching capabilities.

The react-apollo project aims to simplify the integration of GraphQL with React by providing a higher-order component (HOC) that wraps around the `graphql` function from Apollo Client. This HOC allows developers to describe their data requirements and convert the results into the shape required by their components, making it easier to connect their app to server-side data. The project solves common difficulties related to combining GraphQL and React, such as colocation of data, meaningful props, and easy configuration. It also enables server-side rendering, testing, and support for React Native. By using react-apollo, developers can take advantage of the benefits of GraphQL while maintaining a seamless integration with React.

Apollo Client is a GraphQL client that helps developers fetch data and organize their store. It provides an interface for showing part of a big list on the screen while loading it in the background, giving users the feeling of navigating seamlessly through infinite scrolling. To achieve this, Apollo Client introduced the `fetchMore` method on query observables, which allows applications to query additional data and update the original query result. The feature is designed to be flexible and configurable, allowing developers to choose their own pagination schema without imposing any requirements on their GraphQL server. This solution was the result of an extensive collaboration with the open-source community and aims to provide a seamless user experience while maintaining cache normalization benefits.

The new version of Apollo Server 0.2 brings a major upgrade from its previous version, offering improved performance and features such as support for GraphQL with Express, Connect, hapi, and Koa frameworks, simplified and modular codebase, query batching, and stored queries, also known as query whitelisting. The re-write in TypeScript aims to make the project more maintainable and production-ready, while introducing new features that can be easily extended or added by users, making it a solid choice for building GraphQL servers on Node.js.