February 2022 Summaries

In this tutorial, learn how to build a real-time location tracking application using Hasura GraphQL Engine for backend, React, and Apollo for frontend. The app tracks the location of a vehicle in real-time by utilizing Hasura's GraphQL Engine real-time capabilities through subscriptions. Key data models include vehicles and their locations, with timestamps for each location update. The application includes four GraphQL operations: inserting a vehicle, inserting its location, subscribing to the vehicle location, and subscribing to the vehicle itself. Users can view the live app at realtime-location-tracking.demo.hasura.app, with the complete code available on GitHub.

Tanmai Gopal announces $100 million Series C funding led by Greenoaks and supported by Lightspeed's growth arm, Vertex, Nexus, and Strive. The company has been focused on building a sustainable open-source software (OSS) project and business around it. In 2021, Hasura experienced ~4x growth with ~10x growth on its managed cloud service. The funding will be used to double down on the work done so far and continue working alongside partners who share their vision of building a lasting infrastructure company for developers in the next decade and beyond.

In this tutorial, we learn how to build an e-commerce order management dashboard using Appsmith, a low code app builder, and Hasura GraphQL API for backend data fetching. The dashboard allows users to manage the entire product catalogue, view sales, track all details of total and recent orders, and send emails to customers. We connect Appsmith with Hasura's GraphQL API and create an interface that fetches information from a database. Key features include creating customizable internal tools without much effort, building a form on Appsmith for writing operations, adding statistics on the dashboard using JavaScript, and charting on Appsmith based on Hasura data.

The Hasura Team participated in a Q&A session on Reactiflux and answered several questions related to Hasura. They explained how to build custom GraphQL queries using raw SQL in Hasura, the perfect positioning of Hasura in an overall infrastructure, and differentiated Hasura from other services such as BaaS type products, GraphQL databases, and DIY API. The team also discussed handling authorization in a mid to large app in Hasura, scaling/provisioning for projects hosted on Hasura's standard cloud offering, and their thoughts on Postgres DBaaS options. They mentioned working on something called GDWs (GraphQL Data Wrappers) that will allow people to build Postgres FDW-like extensions to Hasura in their favorite programming language.

The use of QR codes has become increasingly popular due to their convenience and efficiency. They can be used for various purposes such as access passes, evidence of having the correct paperwork, or shortcuts to apps. QR codes are essentially bits of data that trigger web requests when scanned by a compatible client like modern phones. A simplified event-driven architecture using QR codes involves several actions: creating content accessible behind a QR code, generating a QR code representation with access instructions, exposing the QR code, scanning it, and receiving triggers from this flow. Hasura can be used to store messages, associated QR codes, and act as the destination for scans. Real-time subscriptions can also be added into the mix. An example app displays a user and admin view side-by-side, showing created QR codes, their number of times scanned, and the scannable QR code itself. This pattern could work for promotional purposes, check-in purposes, or authentication. To build such an app, we need to assemble services like a handler to create the QR code, a handler to read and process the QR code, a service to persist content, and a service to show the QR code. Pipedream can be used for creating actions, while Hasura provides flexibility in handling QR code scans. The QR creation code process involves generating a QR code using NodeJs and writing data back into Hasura. Using Hasura subscriptions, we can listen for the write-back and show this as a real-time response to the person generating the code. The QR code processing service handler follows a similar pattern, with triggers from HTTP requests and REST requests to Hasura REST endpoints. To connect event triggers, proper coordination in Hasura is required using both event triggers and REST handlers. We can now invoke the API using our standard GraphQL API with these services in place and our event orchestration defined. Using two services and Hasura, we can replicate any number of custom behaviors driven by QR code interaction. This simplified process allows us to focus on our domain and not on writing queue management, resolvers, or other non-value-adding code.

In this tutorial, learn how to build a real-time group chat application using Hasura GraphQL Engine without writing any backend code. The focus is on data models stored in Postgres rather than full chat functionality. Key points include creating a user signup mutation, updating the last_seen value of users every two seconds, subscribing to new message events and only fetching new messages, sending messages by inserting rows into the messages table, and managing UI typing indicators and an online users list through subscriptions. A live demo is available at https://realtime-chat.demo.hasura.io/.

In this latest release of Hasura GraphQL Engine v2.2.0, new features and improvements have been introduced to enhance the user experience. These include MSSQL upsert and "undo" functionalities, OpenAPI body specifications for better interoperability with REST ecosystems, and nested action types in response handlers. The update also addresses error handling issues in MSSQL by introducing transaction state querying using XACT_STATE() scalar function. These improvements aim to help developers build more efficient software and improve overall productivity.