New features in GraphQL: Batch, defer, stream, live, and subscribe

Sashko Stubailo recently attended React Europe in Paris, where he learned about new features in the GraphQL spec and transport. Lee Byron presented ideas for the future of the GraphQL spec and transport based on Facebook's internal experiments. One of these ideas is batch operations, which allows sending multiple queries in one request with declared dependencies between them. Another idea is defer, which minimizes the time to first data by allowing clients to receive partial responses before all data is available. Stream enables deferring loading of individual items of an array, and live updates allow servers to patch parts of the result that have already been sent, resulting in real-time updates on the client. Additionally, GraphQL subscriptions are a mechanism for delivering reactive updates using pub/sub systems. These developments demonstrate exciting directions for GraphQL's future and address criticisms about waiting for the whole response before getting data. The new transport format proposed by Lee Byron has great potential for integrating with existing cache mechanisms and other use cases beyond what was presented in the talk.