April 2025 Summaries

The Apollo GraphOS free plan offers a forever-free API orchestration platform, ideal for personal projects, learning, or prototyping with GraphQL. The platform includes services such as GraphOS Explorer IDE, GraphOS Registry, and GraphOS Insights, which help build, manage, and orchestrate APIs at any scale. The free plan has limitations, including rate limits on self-hosted routers and limited access to features like Single Sign-On and advanced collaboration tools. To get started, anyone can create an organization by signing up for GraphOS or logging into Apollo Studio with their existing account. The platform provides a complete API orchestration solution with functionalities such as filtering and transforming data, executing operations synchronously and in parallel, managing authentication and authorization, and integrating diverse data sources seamlessly.

Integrating headless CMS data with any API using GraphQL requires connecting to multiple APIs and orchestrating requests. This can be achieved by using Apollo Connectors for REST, which allows quickly bringing multiple APIs together with a simple configuration. The example uses Strapi as the headless CMS and demonstrates how to set up a project locally, connect the CMS API, test the connector locally, host the Apollo Router, and publish the connector to GraphOS. The process involves creating a schema, adding source and selection directives, testing the connector, hosting the router, and publishing the connector to GraphOS, allowing for hot-reloading via Apollo Uplink. This pattern can be iterated on for any Content-Type defined in Strapi, giving flexibility to express CMS with other APIs without code duplication.

The Apollo Client community is excited to announce the official release of `@apollo/client-integration-nextjs`, a stable package that integrates Apollo Client with Next.js. After two years of testing and refinement, this milestone marks a significant achievement for the Apollo Client community. The new package includes improved support for multipart responses, enabling a truly no-waterfall experience that outperforms plain REST APIs. This hybrid approach allows clients to make requests in the client, merging them into the normalized cache and reducing server-side workload. The release also includes setup instructions and marks the start of alpha releases for React-Router 7 (Remix) and TanStack Start integrations. Additionally, Apollo Client 4.0 has entered the alpha stage, featuring improvements such as modern bundling, reduced bundle size, coherent error handling, and a `useLazyQuery` rewrite.