June 2019 Summaries

Apollo Day is a live webcast event scheduled on July 16th, broadcasted from Seattle. It will help developers learn best practices and hear talks from experts at Apollo and Expedia about adopting GraphQL for their companies. The agenda includes technical talks, a coffee break, an open Q&A session, and networking opportunities, showcasing new platform capabilities and featuring engineers from Expedia already using GraphQL in production. Attendees can also sign up for the webcast or join in-person in Seattle to learn more about implementing GraphQL best practices and hearing about upcoming platform announcements.

GraphQL, a query language for APIs, has been criticized for being incompatible with HTTP caching. However, this criticism lacks nuance and fails to consider the various ways caching can be implemented in GraphQL, including client-side caching, server-side caching, and application-level caching. While GraphQL's transport-agnostic nature makes it challenging to utilize HTTP caching semantics, the lack of a GraphQL over HTTP specification is a significant limitation. Nevertheless, there are alternative approaches to caching in GraphQL, such as using persisted queries or implementing caching middleware for clients. As the field continues to evolve, we can expect to see a mix of GraphQL-specific caching implementations and standardized HTTP caching mechanisms. GraphQL's focus on real-time data and authenticated APIs means it may not be the best fit for applications that require long-lived data served through an HTTP API. Ultimately, understanding the trade-offs and limitations of caching in GraphQL is crucial for building scalable and performant APIs.

Apollo has raised $22 million in venture capital funding to simplify app development by tackling the problem of data management, which is a critical layer that connects apps and devices to the cloud. The platform aims to help developers build brilliant solutions that improve people's lives by providing a unified, always-up-to-date catalog of all available data and its connections, known as a data graph. A data graph can transform how product teams collaborate across the stack, offering benefits such as faster development, consistent user experiences, and strong security and control over data access. With this funding, Apollo plans to accelerate the rollout of its data graph technology to every developer, while maintaining its commitment to growing and supporting its open source community.

Apollo Client 2.6 is a backwards-compatible update that fixes bugs and provides new options for rendering components faster and more smoothly, including `assumeImmutableResults`, `freezeResults`, and `returnPartialData`. The new `assumeImmutableResults` option allows the client to avoid recording defensive snapshots of past results if the application code does not modify cache result objects. Passing `freezeResults: true` to the `InMemoryCache` constructor causes all cache results to be frozen in development, making it easier to detect accidental mutations. The return of `returnPartialData` allows consumers to opt into receiving partial results from the cache for queries not fully satisfied by the cache. Future versions of Apollo Client aim to consolidate and simplify the API while paving the way for new features such as async iterators, unified query API, cache normalization, and immutability of cache results becoming the default. The updated API is designed to make it easier for developers to manage local state and improve performance.