April 2021 Summaries

Testing is crucial for developing high-quality software that can withstand change. Testing approaches include unit, integration, and end-to-end testing. Unit tests focus on individual units of code, such as functions or React components, ensuring they work correctly without relying on expensive operations like network requests. Integration tests verify how cohesive components work together to realize a feature, covering a large surface area while being relatively fast and efficient. End-to-end tests act like real users, engaging in operations that cut across the entire stack, providing confidence in critical features but running slower due to rendering, network requests, and infrastructure considerations. A testing strategy depends on time, team skill level, practice of Test-Driven Development (TDD), and application testability. Effective testing balances speed, surface area coverage, and confidence, with unit tests complementing integration and end-to-end tests for a comprehensive approach.

The first-ever GraphQL Summit Scale took place, bringing together engineering leaders and architects focused on solving the challenges of creating an organization-wide data graph. Keynote speaker Matt DeBergalis emphasized the importance of designing a common graph for agility and composability, while panelists discussed building an adaptive engineering culture that empowers teams to collaborate and learn faster. Companies like Glassdoor, Expedia, and PayPal shared their experiences on scaling GraphQL architectures, including strategies for managing federation, adopting a rotation strategy, and driving graph adoption at scale. The event also featured sessions on best practices for becoming a Graph Champion and lessons learned from early adopters, providing valuable insights for developers and organizations looking to implement GraphQL solutions.

The GraphQL Summit Worldwide 2021 conference covered various topics including client-side GraphQL, federation, subscriptions, and testing. Apollo released new tools to help developers build better with GraphQL, such as Apollo Studio's GraphQL IDE, Rover CLI tool, and Apollo Workbench. The conference also featured talks on client-side state management, testing React Apollo Client, mobile app development, architecture, and federated data graph usage. Key speakers included Ankita Kulkarni, Adhithi Ravichandran, Ellen Shapiro, Martin Bonnin, Mandi Wise, Faraz Ahmad, Kyle Schrade, Jason Lengstorf, Taz Singh, and Ash Narcisse. The conference aimed to provide insights into GraphQL best practices, tooling, and architecture for a wide range of developers.

The new Consumer role in Apollo Studio allows users to invite an unlimited number of team members with access only to the graph's Explorer, schema changelog, and schema reference documentation. This feature is available on all plan tiers, including Free and Team plans, and provides visibility and discoverability while preventing unwanted changes. With the Consumer role, users have instant access to Apollo Studio Explorer, schema reference, and changelog, making it suitable for sharing graph power with everyone in an organization. The new feature can be invited through direct assignment or creation of a shareable invite link, and additional permissions can be set up using Enterprise-only roles.

Apollo Federation is a solution that enables teams to work in parallel by unblocking them from aligning their work with other teams. It allows front-end teams to build new experiences faster by directly querying the graph and not waiting for new REST endpoints to be built. With Apollo Federation, each service or domain team can own their part of the graph schema, known as the subgraph, while building a unified common graph for their developers. The solution has gained traction with hundreds of companies, including Netflix, Adobe, Walmart, and StockX, which are adopting it as a graph integration strategy. The industry adoption of the Federation Specification is also growing, with more than a dozen GraphQL servers supporting federation. Customers such as Modern Health have reported success with Apollo Federation in powering their product development and fulfilling their mission. New tools and features, including composition validation and webhooks, are being integrated into the platform to further support distributed GraphQL architecture.

The Apollo Federation team has announced new free tools to help developers use federation, an architecture for composing multiple graphs into a single data graph. The new tools include improvements in Apollo Studio for managing federated graphs, Rover, a new open-source Rust CLI for interacting with graphs and schemas, and Workbench, an open-source VS Code extension for designing and growing federated schemas. Federation allows developers to compose subgraphs into a supergraph, making it easier to manage complex data relationships. The tools aim to simplify the process of developing and consuming federated graphs, reducing the feedback loop between changes and impact on the supergraph.

<|fim_im_end|>` The article discusses the use of Apollo's GraphQL codegen feature to generate TypeScript types for GraphQL operations in an Apollo Client project. The author, Khalil Stemmler, explains that good design is primarily discoverability and feedback, and how typed languages like TypeScript provide compile-time types as a form of feedback. He argues that using Apollo's codegen feature can help developers build client-side GraphQL applications more efficiently by generating TypeScript types for queries written in an Apollo Client project. The article provides a step-by-step guide on how to use the codegen feature, including installing dependencies, downloading the schema, and generating types for remote and client-only operations. The author also discusses how to extend the graph with local schema files and save the codegen command as an NPM script. Overall, the article aims to help developers generate TypeScript types for their GraphQL operations more efficiently and write fewer bugs.