January 2018 Summaries

The React Apollo team has released version 2.1 of their GraphQL client, featuring a new `Query` component that brings data into the render function in a flexible and efficient way, making it easier to compose multiple operations and update state without passing down props. This design was driven by real-world needs of the community, with contributions from many developers, including Kevin Ross, Dirk-Jan Rutten, Leonardo A Garcia C, and Jason Miller. The new component also supports Preact for server-side rendering and has improved TypeScript support, including parameterized types that enable full typing and checking. The team is now in beta phase and invites feedback on the new release, which should work out of the box with no breaking changes.

The author of this text, James Baxley III, spent a holiday break playing around with the new programming language ReasonML, which is built on top of OCaml and designed to be compiled into JavaScript. He chose to rebuild an existing GraphQL endpoint example from Apollo Launchpad, and was impressed by Reason's benefits, including its modules system, which allows for easy modeling of types in separate files. The author also discovered that Reason has immutable data by design, where fields are immutable by default, and that it uses a concept called "ref" to allow specific fields to be mutable. After learning about these features, the author was able to create an Express app using Bucklescript, which compiles Reason code into JavaScript, making it easy to integrate with existing JavaScript apps. Finally, the author deployed their app to AWS Lambda using the tool Up by TJ Holowaychuk, and was impressed by the incredible tooling available for developers to learn and build products. The author concludes that community support is crucial for a project's success, and hopes to continue exploring and helping others as they build new things and try new ideas.

GraphQL was announced and initially open-sourced in 2015, with relatively little fanfare, but by 2017 it had taken off, growing from a niche technology to something being used in production by thousands of serious companies. Established teams made big bets on GraphQL, including Walmart, IBM, the New York Times, and KLM/Air France, which gave confidence to developers worldwide to switch to GraphQL for their APIs. This year saw major advancements in GraphQL, with the addition of subscriptions, the release of Apollo Client 1.0 and 2.0, Relay Modern, and other significant open source releases. The first GraphQL conference in Europe, GraphQL Europe, was held in May, and Graphcool officially launched its platform in May, making it easier for developers to get a GraphQL backend up and running. The second edition of GraphQL Summit was held in October, with over 30 talks about the hottest topics in GraphQL, and Apollo Engine was launched as a "GraphQL Gateway" component that can be used to simplify GraphQL server code. AWS AppSync was announced in November, validating GraphQL as a mainstream technology. With these developments, 2017 marked a huge leap forward for GraphQL, and 2018 is expected to be just like that again.