June 2017 Summaries

The Explore GraphQL website aims to provide a comprehensive resource for individuals interested in adopting GraphQL as their new API layer, filling the gap left by existing resources that focus primarily on technical documentation and tutorials. The site's primary goal is to communicate the excitement around GraphQL and give users the tools to get started with implementing it in production at their organization. Explore GraphQL covers various topics such as the benefits of development velocity, best practices for implementation, and success stories from companies that have already adopted GraphQL. By providing a curated list of resources, including articles on getting started, production guides, and success stories, the website seeks to help newcomers navigate the adoption process with confidence. The team behind Explore GraphQL is open to community input and new content ideas, aiming to create an ever-improving resource for the GraphQL community.

The author of an article about Prettier's support for GraphQL mentions that Prettier, a popular code formatter, now supports GraphQL and has been made more user-friendly with features such as maximum line-width, comma usage, and breaking up long lists of arguments. The development of this feature was not a straightforward process but involved contributions from multiple developers who were enthusiastic about adding support for every corner of the language. The author expresses gratitude to Vjeux and Sashko for their efforts in making Prettier work with GraphQL and hopes that the tool will be as useful to users as it has been for them.

GraphQL vs. REST: A comparison of two API paradigms, where GraphQL has a more flexible schema, allows for multiple fields to be executed in one request, and enables the consumer to decide which related resources to fetch, while both have similar concepts of endpoints and resource identification, with REST being more traditional and linear in its approach.

<|fim_im_cobranca|>` The article discusses five lesser-known features of React-Apollo, a popular tool for data fetching and management in React applications. It highlights the importance of handling pagination, conditional data fetching, batching requests, fallback data fetching, and polling in building dynamic applications with GraphQL. The article provides code examples to illustrate each feature, demonstrating how React-Apollo can simplify data fetching and improve application performance.

This tutorial guides developers through implementing server-side GraphQL subscriptions using the `graphql-subscriptions` package. The tutorial starts by setting up a basic client and server, and then adds a subscription to notify clients of new messages in a channel. It covers the process of adding a subscription resolver, publishing events to an in-memory pub/sub object, and resolving subscription queries. Finally, it sets up a WebSocket transport for subscriptions using the `subscriptions-transport-ws` package, allowing the server to push updates to the client in near real-time. The tutorial concludes by highlighting the implementation of server-side GraphQL subscriptions and encouraging developers to learn more about Apollo and GraphQL.

Launchpad is a platform that allows users to prototype GraphQL servers and create learning experiences in JavaScript. It provides an experience close to writing regular GraphQL server code while avoiding unnecessary complexity for the user and implementation. Launchpad exposes a specialized API, allowing users to export GraphQL-specific objects, such as schema or context, which are then wrapped into a complete server during deployment. The platform uses Babel for transpilation and allows users to provide secrets, enabling real-world use cases like database-driven APIs. Launchpad faces the challenge of scaling user-provided server code while maintaining fast deploy times, using Auth0 Extend's function-as-a-service platform. The platform consists of a Node server managing pad storage and permission handling, a React app for displaying the code editor and GraphiQL, and a node proxy controlling requests to the Auth0 extend container. Launchpad aims to lower barriers to GraphQL adoption and make it easier to teach about GraphQL server development by enabling users to create lots of great GraphQL examples.

A stronger (typed) React Apollo` discusses the benefits of using static typing with Apollo Client and React Apollo. The article highlights how static typing can help reduce common classes of bugs in JavaScript, such as type errors, by providing better code completion, catching errors earlier, and making the codebase more maintainable. It also showcases how to use Flow typings with Apollo Client and React Apollo, including defining types for response data, understanding render functions, taking control of your tree, shaping your props, and enforcing prop requirements. The article aims to provide a solid foundation for developers who want to start using static typing with React Apollo and improve their code quality.

Reducing code with React Apollo: A small team at Major League Soccer, Major League Soccer, successfully reduced nearly 5,000 lines of code by offloading data fetching management to Apollo, resulting in a more declarative application. They achieved this by leveraging GraphQL's features such as incremental adoption, polling, and fetchMore, which allowed them to simplify their Redux-based application and reduce maintenance burden. By using Apollo's higher-order components like graphql() and compose(), they were able to reuse familiar concepts from Redux to build more scalable and maintainable applications. The team's experience demonstrates the benefits of adopting a GraphQL-first approach for managing data fetching in React applications.

Graphcool is a serverless GraphQL platform used to build production-ready GraphQL backends. It allows developers to create and manage their GraphQL APIs with ease, using its CLI tool. The Graphcool CLI enables users to install the necessary dependencies, initialize their project, and create a GraphQL backend based on a predefined schema. Apollo Client is used to connect React applications to the GraphQL backend, allowing for efficient data fetching and caching. The tutorial demonstrates how to build a simple Instagram app using React, GraphQL, and Graphcool, showcasing the capabilities of the Apollo Client and its integration with the Graphcool platform. Additionally, it introduces GraphQL subscriptions, which enable real-time functionality by subscribing to specific events happening in the backend.

This tutorial guides developers through creating a messaging application using GraphQL and React. The tutorial is divided into eight parts, each focusing on a specific aspect of the application. In this part, we focus on input types and custom resolvers, which allow us to define the structure of our data and query it in a flexible way. We learn how to use field arguments, make the most out of Apollo's normalized cache, and create a GraphQL input type to keep client mutation signatures tidy. The tutorial also covers reading the channel name from the cache using a custom resolver, which enables us to display the channel name immediately while loading the messages in the background. By following this tutorial, developers can build a fully functional messaging application with real-time updates and pagination.

The GraphQL Summit 2017 will take place at the Bespoke venue in San Francisco, featuring a diverse group of speakers covering various topics related to GraphQL technology and ecosystem. The event aims to provide a platform for developers and engineering leaders to explore technical questions and discuss adoption strategies for GraphQL in large production applications. A call for proposals is open until July 31, 2017, with speakers encouraged to submit multiple proposals detailing their expertise on using GraphQL in production. Lee Byron will serve as the official conference MC, bringing his experience as a creator and maintainer of the GraphQL specification and reference implementation at Facebook. The event promises to be an exciting opportunity for developers to network and learn from one another, with advanced tickets and speaker announcements expected in the coming weeks.