March 2019 Summaries

GraphQL Asia is an upcoming conference featuring talks from industry experts, hands-on workshops, and opportunities for attendees to interact with speakers. The event will cover various aspects of implementing GraphQL in companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Paypal, Adobe, Philips Healthcare, Treebo, Tokopedia, Cleartrip, Microsoft, Amazon, and more. There will be beginner to advanced level workshops for attendees to learn about GraphQL and related tools. The conference is open to everyone from frontend developers to team leaders and CTOs interested in learning about GraphQL's benefits and implementation. Tickets are available with group discounts, diversity tickets, and student discounts. Sponsorship opportunities are also available for companies interested in supporting the event.

This tutorial demonstrates how to build a progressive Todo web app using Vuetify, Vuex, VueApollo, and Hasura GraphQL Engine. The tech stack includes Vue.js with Vuetify for Material Design UI, Vuex for state management, and VueApollo for making GraphQL queries. The app is built on the foundation of davidgaroro/vuetify-todo-pwa, which uses Vuetify for the TodoMVC UI with material design and Vuex for state management. Hasura GraphQL Engine is used to get instant GraphQL APIs over Postgres. The app also includes a boilerplate setup for a Progressive Web App (PWA) with an app manifest, service worker, and Workbox options to cache Google Fonts. The source code for the app can be found on GitHub.

This post discusses how to build an image processing app using GraphQL and serverless functions. The app allows users to upload images and convert them to sepia tone asynchronously. It uses Hasura GraphQL Engine, a real-time GraphQL server over Postgres, and an event sourcing system to trigger external webhooks on mutations. The backend architecture follows the 3factor.app pattern, which includes real-time GraphQL, reliable eventing, and async serverless. The frontend has two screens: Upload and Convert. The upload screen inserts the image URL into the database with a GraphQL mutation and redirects to the convert screen with the image ID as a parameter. The convert screen waits for the processed image using GraphQL subscriptions and renders it when available.

A remote schema is an external GraphQL service that can be integrated with Hasura GraphQL Engine for a unified GraphQL API. This approach allows developers to incrementally adopt GraphQL in existing infrastructure by wrapping pre-existing REST APIs within a GraphQL layer. In this process, the developer creates a new GraphQL schema and fills in types and fields based on the REST API endpoints. Then, resolvers are added to map the incoming GraphQL requests to the corresponding REST API endpoints. Finally, the service is deployed and its URL is added as a Remote Schema in Hasura for automatic schema-stitching. This method offers several advantages such as incremental adoption of GraphQL, type safety, readability, and a unified API layer.

graphql2chartjs is an open-source tool that reshapes GraphQL data into a format compatible with ChartJS API. This makes building realtime charts as simple as making a GraphQL query. The tool works by generating ChartJS compliant data objects from your GraphQL response, allowing you to create various types of charts such as bar, line, doughnut, pie, radar, polar area, and area charts. It also supports scatter, bubble, and time series charts with different data inputs. To use graphql2chartjs, initialize it, add data from your GraphQL response, set the chart data, and optionally incrementally add data to an existing instance. The tool can also take a transformer function for adding custom properties to data points.

This post discusses how to set up a git push workflow for deploying functions on AWS Lambda using CircleCI. The process involves setting up a repository with functions, one-time setup of AWS and CircleCI, configuring CircleCI, and performing a git push. The goal is to have environment-specific HTTP endpoints for each function in three environments: Dev, Stg, and Prod. The post also provides a sample repo structure and outlines the steps required for setting up Lambda Execution Role on AWS, API Gateway, adding repos in CircleCI, and configuring environment variables in CircleCI. Finally, it explains how to use the provided files (config.yml and deploy.sh) to build and deploy functions to Lambda with an API Gateway.

This post discusses different ways of dealing with application state when writing business logic in serverless functions. It primarily uses Postgres as the database and often employs Hasura as a solution to connect serverless functions with Postgres. The four approaches discussed are: 1) Connecting directly to Postgres from your serverless function, 2) Using Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) APIs from your serverless function, 3) Triggering serverless functions on Postgres events with rich event payloads, and 4) Combining the above approaches and using Postgres to orchestrate a workflow with serverless functions driving state transitions. The post also provides best practices for connecting to Postgres directly from a serverless function and highlights the use of BaaS services like S3 APIs, Hasura GraphQL APIs, and Algolia.