April 2017 Summaries

The Apollo Client is a unified GraphQL client for JavaScript, iOS, and Android, designed to simplify data management in frontend applications. The core idea behind Apollo is that managing data should be straightforward, allowing developers to focus on building great apps. With the growing trend of mobile-first development, where companies build apps for multiple platforms (web, iOS, and Android), Apollo aims to solve the problem of inconsistent data loading and management across these platforms. GraphQL's simplicity, performance, and caching capabilities make it an ideal choice for cross-platform apps. The Apollo community is working on unifying the client across all JavaScript and native platforms, with a focus on improving existing apps by adding GraphQL incrementally. The unified client architecture will feature a shared global cache, providing thread-safety and methods for manipulating data using GraphQL primitives, making it easy to plug in any store. This design will enable seamless integration between native and React Native, resulting in improved offline data management, smoother UI, and prefetching data from native code before React Native has initialized. The Apollo community invites developers to get involved by joining the Slack channel, contributing to open-source efforts, or reporting bugs and issues on GitHub.

Sashko Stubailo explores GraphQL Relay Modern, a redesigned version of the client framework that aims to simplify its interface while maintaining performance and modularity. The new version builds upon Relay Classic's modular data fetching approach but introduces significant changes, including static and persist-able queries, simpler mutations, and a view-agnostic runtime. The author reflects on the benefits of these changes, including improved validation, persisting, and build-time transformation and optimization. A simple example app demonstrates how to try out Relay Modern, and the author encourages feedback and contributions to improve the library.

The Apollo Android GraphQL client is a library that generates Java models from standard GraphQL queries, providing a typesafe API to work with GraphQL servers. It includes features such as code generation, network calls and caching, RxJava wrappers, and optional support. The library aims to simplify the process of working with GraphQL in Android applications, allowing developers to create complex queries and manage data efficiently. With its open-source nature and community-driven development, Apollo Android has become a valuable resource for Android developers looking to leverage the power of GraphQL in their apps.

The GraphiQL library already supports subscriptions, allowing users to configure their own transport and enabling live-stream subscriptions into the app's GraphiQL editor. To use this feature, developers need to add a new field called `subscriptionsEndpoint` to the `graphiqlExpress` config with the Websocket URL of the subscriptions endpoint. This allows users to write GraphQL subscriptions queries in GraphiQL, which will be pushed into the client and displayed in real-time, using a plug-and-play solution provided by the `graphql-subscriptions-fetcher`. The feature is available for use with various server frameworks such as Express, Hapi, Koa, Restify, and Lambda.

A sophisticated GraphQL client implementation, such as Apollo Client, can help developers construct correctly formed requests, keep their UI components consistent across queries, and provide flexible ways to update the cache with results from the server when using mutations, pagination, subscriptions, and more. By leveraging the structure of GraphQL, these libraries enable developers to implement these properties, making development experiences more pleasant. However, it's essential to separate reality from misconceptions about GraphQL clients' roles, as their primary goals are not solely focused on improving performance or ensuring client-server consistency, but rather on facilitating the execution of GraphQL queries and maintaining UI consistency.