February 2025 Summaries

Apollo Connectors is a system that enables declarative API development by allowing developers to declare the data and capabilities of existing APIs, making it easier to orchestrate requests. The system uses GraphQL directives to implement fields, which can be connected to backend services using HTTP endpoints. Apollo Connectors extend the declarative approach of GraphQL, aligning with other systems like Kubernetes and Docker. They provide a way to automatically orchestrate API calls, reducing the need for Back-End For Frontend (BFF) solutions. The system is designed to work seamlessly with existing subgraphs and can be used with various types of APIs, including HTTP/JSON APIs and RPC implementations. Connectors are now generally available and ready for production use, offering a free tier and a community forum for support and sharing experiences.

The Apollo team has released their 2025 Winter Launch, which includes several exciting features and improvements. The new release introduces Apollo Connectors for REST APIs, a general availability of Router 2.0 with a native query planner, improved tools, and more. Apollo Connectors allows developers to easily map REST API endpoints to their GraphQL schema using a declarative syntax, making it easier to integrate data from REST APIs in the graph. The new query planner in Router 2.0 is blazing-fast and rock-solid, supporting dynamic queries and generating query plans at runtime. Additionally, there are improvements to Apollo Client, Apollo iOS, and Apollo Kotlin, including suspense-enabled React hooks, declarative cache management, and an experimental next-generation caching library. The Apollo GraphOS platform has also been updated with a new free pricing plan, making it easier for developers to get started building with Apollo.

The Apollo Connectors for REST APIs bring declarative, graph-based orchestration technology to teams using non-GraphQL APIs. This allows developers to describe the data model they want and let the Apollo infrastructure figure out how to make it happen, replacing procedural code with a more efficient and scalable approach. The connectors include features such as API call chaining, parallelization, error handling, authentication, and transformation of responses, all made available through GraphQL schemas and operations. With Apollo Connectors, developers can now use graph-based API orchestration without needing to add GraphQL APIs or create new services, making it easier to build applications and integrate multiple APIs together. The technology is designed to replace procedural code with a more efficient and scalable approach, enabling faster development and reduced maintenance costs.

API Orchestration with Connectors – Thinking in Entities` The article discusses how to build faster APIs by identifying and exposing entities already defined in REST APIs as connectors. It emphasizes the importance of understanding which objects in an API are entities, which can be identified by unique identifiers or URL structures. The article provides examples of exposing entities such as `Pet` and `Price`, and demonstrates how to connect these entities to other endpoints using the `@connect` directive. It also covers the use of multiple `@connect` directives and highlights best practices for designing connectors. The goal is to unlock existing REST APIs for developers by providing a better way to orchestrate API endpoints.