October 2021 Summaries

Hasura Learn has expanded its educational offerings with over 25 courses on GraphQL, databases, and Hasura. The platform aims to help developers learn these technologies quickly and efficiently. Courses cover topics such as frontend development with popular languages and frameworks, fullstack applications with Hasura backend, database fundamentals for various platforms, and advanced Hasura features. Tutorials are open-source and maintained by the GraphQL and Hasura community. The site has recently undergone a redesign to accommodate its growing number of courses, and two popular courses have been translated into Mandarin and Japanese. Future plans include translating more courses into additional languages, developing new courses for various stacks and databases, and collaborating with the community on educational content.

The first beta release of v2.1 series with v2.1.0-beta.1 has been announced by Hasura. This release focuses on enhancing the flexibility of custom business logic through new features in Hasura Actions/Event Triggers and Remote Schema name spacing. It also prepares for adding support to mutations in Microsoft SQL Server. Key highlights include webhook transforms, actions enhancements, remote schema customization, preparations for MSSQL mutations and generalized joins, performance fixes for large db schemas, optimized SQL query generation with LIMITs, and bug fixes across the server and console. The release is available on Docker target hasura/graphql-engine:v2.1.0-beta.1.

The Hasura Tips & Tricks Contest is running from October 1 to November 30, 2021. Participants are encouraged to share their favorite tips and tricks for working with Hasura, ranging from simple shortcuts to complex input filters. Prizes include stickers, access to Hasura Cloud Standard for top submissions, and an Amazon Gift Card for the most creative, unique, and popular submissions. Submissions can be made via Twitter, Discord, or other social platforms, with a limit of 140 characters or less than 2 minutes in video length. The contest aims to showcase the diverse ways users are utilizing Hasura in their app development processes.

This blog post discusses implementing authorization for organization-based, team-based, or tenant-based apps in Hasura. It outlines a common organization-based permission system and provides an example of how to model such permissions using only Hasura's standard permissions system and authorization rules. The solution works for any "group"-like structure, including teams, organizations, tenants in multi-tenant apps, chat group-messages, etc. The article demonstrates how to create relationships between tables and set up appropriate permissions to ensure that users can only see/interact with other entities within their own groups.

This article discusses the top ways to write a custom GraphQL Server with production-ready features. It covers popular libraries for each language and how to add features like authorization, rate limiting, caching, etc. The common interface to try out GraphQL requests is GraphiQL. Languages discussed include Node + GraphQL, Python + GraphQL, Golang + GraphQL, Ruby + GraphQL, Java + GraphQL, .NET + GraphQL, and more. It also touches upon the use of plugins for production-ready features and how to extend custom servers to interact with other GraphQL servers.

Function as a Service (FaaS) is a cloud computing model where the cloud provider executes a single function in response to an event. It has gained popularity due to its cost-effectiveness, ease of maintenance, and scalability. However, it also comes with some disadvantages such as higher latency and portability issues. When choosing a FaaS provider, factors like workload, latency, pricing, speed of prototype, and compatibility with existing infrastructure should be considered. AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, Vercel, Gatsby Cloud functions, Netlify functions, Cloudflare Workers, Fly.io, Oracle Functions, IBM Functions, Tencent Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Redhat Open Shift, and No-Code/Low-Code providers are some of the popular FaaS providers available in the market. FaaS can be used with Hasura through actions and events to design serverless workloads that execute behind a custom query or mutation field, perform custom authentication logic, or react to events happening in your database.

Hasura is participating in the annual Hacktoberfest organized by Digital Ocean for the fourth consecutive year. This year, participants can contribute to the Hasura GraphQL Engine or participate in the Hasura Tips & Tricks Contest. For valid contributions made after October 31st, participants will receive a swag box from Hasura. The deadline for submitting Pull Requests (PRs) is November 14th. Additionally, Hasura is hosting a contest where participants can share their favorite tips and tricks related to app development with Hasura. Winners of the contest will receive special prizes, while all participants will receive some Hasura swag.

This article discusses how to architect an application with existing GraphQL and REST APIs using Hasura. It covers making your GraphQL APIs production-ready, securing them, optimizing for high performance, monitoring and observability, joining data with other sources, and reusing existing REST APIs with Hasura. The article also explains how to add custom GraphQL servers via Remote Schemas in Hasura, secure APIs without writing any code, add GraphQL caching to reduce response times, monitor and observe APIs, join your response data with any source, enable permissions for remote schemas, limit requests to your API per minute/hour, apply limits based on user identity and session variables, cache existing GraphQL servers, and use distributed tracing for visibility into the system.

This article provides an overview of the current state of querying content with the GraphQL query syntax. It covers types of operations, parts of a query such as fields, aliases, arguments, fragments, variables, and directives. The article also discusses ways to query using string queries, fluent GraphQL clients like GraphQL Zeus, and GraphQL Code Generator. It emphasizes the growing GraphQL ecosystem and its potential for developers today.

Implementing a hierarchical authorization system similar to Google Drive within Hasura involves utilizing a role and permissions model that supports both hierarchical roles and dynamic access controls. The system is designed for complex scenarios where users, organized into teams, work on projects with assigned folder access, allowing permissions to be inherited through a parent-child relationship unless overridden by specific rules. A database schema featuring tables for users, folders, teams, and permissions is employed to structure the data, with SQL views dynamically generating a flattened view of the folder-user-access level relationships to accommodate unknown relationship depths. Hasura's permission clauses are then configured using JSON structures to allow or restrict user actions based on their access type and user ID, effectively managing hierarchical and individual folder access permissions.