November 2022 Summaries

Apollo Server 2 & 3 are officially deprecated and will reach their final end-of-life on October 22, 2023. The subscriptions, uploads, and Playground features of Apollo Server 2 will have an earlier end-of-life on December 31, 2022. After this time, security patches and fixes for major regressions will continue until October 2023. Apollo Server 4 is now generally available, offering a lightweight and easier-to-use experience compared to previous iterations. Users of Apollo Server 2 or 3 can find information about migrating to Apollo Server 4 in the provided guide.

Apollo Gateway v0.x is now officially deprecated and will reach its end-of-life on September 22, 2023. The project has stopped active development, but security patches and major fixes will be released until then. Users are recommended to migrate to Apollo Router v1.x for improved performance and capabilities, which includes features like cors, logging, telemetry, and traffic shaping. Apollo Gateway 2.x is a drop-in upgrade from Gateway 0.x, allowing plugins and middleware written for 0.x to work unmodified. The development focus will shift to Apollo Router in the future.

Apollo GraphOS is a supergraph platform that improves client app's time-to-interactive (TTI) and reduces latency in GraphQL APIs by using the `@defer` directive. The `@defer` directive marks slow parts of a query, allowing them to be delivered asynchronously, resulting in faster TTI and reduced latency. To use `@defer`, you need to connect your GraphQL API to the supergraph, define entities in your schema, and mark slow fields with `@defer`. With Apollo GraphOS, you can improve your app's user experience by deferring slow parts of queries, making it a great tool for reducing latency and improving TTI. The tutorial covers how to use `@defer` with Explorer, a GraphQL IDE, and provides examples on how to implement `@defer` in React applications.

Apollo Server 4 is a lightweight, open-source GraphQL server that's compatible with any GraphQL client. It introduces the `@apollo/server` package, decoupling plugins and frameworks from the core of Apollo Server, offering a stable API for HTTP and serverless frameworks. This allows users to build Apollo Server integrations for their framework of choice. The new version also simplifies its package structure, reducing bundle size, and provides a TypeScript-first development experience with schema-first documentation. Additionally, it improves type safety by enabling the use of typescript-resolvers and ensures resolver types match schema types through static checks. With its release, Apollo Server 4 is now generally available for users to start building production-ready GraphQL APIs.