October 2016 Summaries

The GraphQL Summit 2016 was a one-day conference held in San Francisco where over 350 GraphQL enthusiasts gathered to discuss and learn about the technology. The event featured keynote talks, panel discussions, lightning talks, and presentations from various companies and developers, including Shopify, Google, Facebook, and others. The Apollo team's CEO, Geoff Schmidt, kicked off the day with a keynote that highlighted the progress of GraphQL, while also announcing a new commercial product for instrumenting GraphQL servers. The conference covered topics such as using GraphQL with Angular 2, scaling APIs, and best practices for building GraphQL-first applications. The event concluded with a reception on the roof, where attendees reflected on the growth and potential of GraphQL in the future.

The concept of "GraphQL First" is emerging as a promising approach for building modern apps by leveraging the schema as a contract between UI and services, enabling declarative queries instead of imperative code. This architecture allows for self-contained components, parallel development, and incremental adoption from weekend projects to large-scale applications like Facebook. The GraphQL community has been actively working on tools and libraries to support this approach, including Apollo Client, which is now production-ready, and Apollo Optics, a tool for monitoring and understanding GraphQL APIs. The community is also growing through events like the GraphQL Summit and focused technical support, with opportunities for developers to contribute and learn from each other.

Sashko Stubailo, a developer at Facebook, has observed that writing GraphQL queries as static strings is becoming a de-facto best practice in the GraphQL community. This approach offers several benefits, including improved tooling integration, code generation for static typing, server-side logging, persisted queries, and a common language for data fetching. By using static queries, developers can leverage tools like editor integrations, validation errors, autocompletion, and highlighting, as well as features like persisted queries that enable efficient query management and analytics. Additionally, the use of static queries facilitates communication between API developers and UI developers, making it easier to share tools and vocabulary across different apps.

The proposal for GraphQL subscriptions aims to create a standardized, transport- and backend-independent implementation that can be easily integrated into any server and client. The `graphql-subscriptions` package provides a small wrapper around the GraphQL.js execution engine, allowing subscriptions to be executed in response to pub-sub events. A minimal websocket protocol is provided by the `subscriptions-transport-ws` package, which defines a simple set of messages for starting and stopping subscriptions, as well as receiving data. The implementation is designed to be decoupled from the pub-sub system and transport, making it easy to integrate with different backend technologies. The authors aim to collaborate with GraphQL server authors, frontend libraries, and tools to implement support for subscriptions in production apps, with a focus on making subscriptions one of the three main operations people expect from their server.

The new Apollo documentation site has been revamped with a focus on guide-oriented content to help developers build their apps more efficiently. The site features two primary guides for React and Angular, showcasing how to use Apollo's Optimistic UI support and other key features. A new developer landing page explains the benefits of Apollo Client and provides simple code snippets for getting started with queries, mutations, and subscriptions. The site also includes a comprehensive list of resources, including introductory materials on the iOS client library, core documentation for the Vanilla JS library, and tools for working with GraphQL. Additionally, there's a community section with contributions guidelines and a code of conduct, as well as information about getting involved in the developer community.