February 2019 Summaries

Next.js 8 introduces support for serverless deployment, allowing developers to split applications into serverless lambdas for improved reliability and scalability. This "pay for what you use" model offers benefits such as distributed points of failure and scale as needed. To test this feature, the author created a Next.js 8 app integrating Hasura GraphQL Engine, with instructions provided to get started. Enabling serverless mode involves adding the serverless build target in next.config.js. Deploying the app to the Now Platform allows for seamless cloud deployment and management of lambdas across regions.

A guide has been published on how to use Realtime GraphQL API on Azure with Hasura and Azure Database for PostgreSQL. The guide includes a Resource Manager template to deploy Hasura on Azure backed by Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Container Instances, which can be used with an existing database or a new one that is automatically provisioned. Additionally, Hasura has announced its availability on Microsoft Azure Cloud starting June 2023, making it accessible on all leading cloud providers including AWS and GCP. Furthermore, the integration of Azure Active Directory with Hasura JWT Claims Mapping allows for customization and supports a wide variety of providers and implementations.

This tutorial demonstrates how to build a react-static site using GraphQL on Postgres. React-static is a highly performant static site generator for React that supports custom query layers like GraphQL. The API part of JAMStack allows users to create powerful static sites, with all database actions abstracted into GraphQL APIs and accessed over HTTPS with JavaScript. Hasura provides GraphQL APIs on top of Postgres, which can be leveraged effectively to build a site with react-static. A demo app is provided that walks through building a simple blog app, listing all authors and articles written by each author. The implementation details involve fetching data from Postgres and templating it on a React component using GraphQL queries. This method of rendering static pages improves performance and makes scaling easier with the use of CDNs. A boilerplate and tutorial are available for users to get started quickly, and further reading is suggested on JAMStack and react-static documentation.

The GraphQL Contributor Days event is back by popular demand and will take place in San Francisco on February 8th, 2019. This quarterly event, organized in partnership with This Dot Labs, aims to bring together members of the GraphQL community to discuss key topics within the ecosystem and facilitate cross collaboration. The event will feature discussions on various aspects of GraphQL, including tooling, community initiatives, gateway architecture, and more. Notable guests for this upcoming session include creators of Gatsby, Graphene, Apollo, AppSync, as well as engineers from companies using GraphQL in production such as Coursera, AWS AppSync, Docker, Paypal, Twitter, Netflix, Moon Highway, Intuit, and Facebook. The event is non-broadcasted and invite only, with interested attendees encouraged to sign up for an invitation.

GraphQL Contributor Days is a community discussion event hosted by ThisDot and Hasura. In November 2018, the first event was held in San Francisco with participants from various companies such as Medium, Twitter, eBay, GitHub, Coursera, Netflix, Gatsby, PayPal, Docker, and others. The discussions covered topics like GraphQL & microservices, error handling in GraphQL, GraphQL in production (authorization, caching, security), GraphQL on the client, GraphQL subscriptions, sampling GraphQL, and miscellaneous discussions. Key points from the discussion include: - Different approaches to incorporating GraphQL with microservices were discussed, including automated gateways, monolithic services, and hybrid approaches. - Error handling in GraphQL was emphasized, suggesting modeling errors in the type system using union types. However, it was noted that this is a breaking change for clients and should be rolled out thoughtfully. - Practices around authorization, security, performance, caching, and other aspects of GraphQL in production were shared by different teams. - Client-side state management with Redux vs apollo-link-state was discussed, with some teams preferring local component state or using a parent component to manage state. - Relay's ideas for handling cache updates and query optimization were considered interesting but not widely adopted due to its opinionated nature. - GraphQL subscriptions are still not commonly used, but there is interest in live queries and the @live and @defer tags.