Transitioning from REST to GraphQL

This is the first post of a series I will be talking about GraphQL and it all came from this tweet I saw a few months ago

I could not understand the joke because I did not know what GraphQL is. So, I started my research and here I want to share my findings with you.

What is GraphQL

GraphQL is a new API standard developed and open-sourced by Facebook, and nowadays, it is maintained by a large community over the world.

As mentioned on howtographql.com

GraphQL enables declarative data fetching where a client can specify exactly what data it needs from the API. In other words, you can create a query to filter only the data you want, avoiding over and under fetching data.

Let me show you an example.

Coming from a REST World

Imagine you have a requirement like this gorgeous windows form:

What's Next

With GraphQL, we could solve our form update request without any update from the API side, only updating our query. This means the 'Change Request' or 'Feature Request' only goes to the front end team, and the API team does not have to do anything ... hopefully :)

On the next series parts, I will be talking about writing data to the API and we will create our API project to receive GraphQL queries request and send back the answer.

All the info on this post was inspired by reading howtographql.com so definitely take a look there if you are looking to see how you can leverage GraphQL!