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Can anyone explain what this is all about? I followed the tutorial, but still cannot understand what are the ideas behind Relay/GraphQL. There must be some prin

by pathsjs 11y ago

Can anyone explain what this is all about? I followed the tutorial, but still cannot understand what are the ideas behind Relay/GraphQL. There must be some principles why the application is structured that way, but without seeing them, it looks like layers of indirection for the sake of complication. When React came out, the core ideas were crystalline, and I was able to see the advantages in 5 minutes and to actually start doing something in 15. I would be happy to share the excitement for Relay... anyone care to explain? :-)

alexobenauer 11y ago
Nothing explains the motivations for Relay/GraphQL better than their introduction of it earlier this year, I'd recommend watching the video: http://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/02/20/introducing-relay-and-graphql.html http://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/02/20/introducing-...
- pathsjs 11y ago
  Is there anything in text format? I really cannot follow the whole video right now. I tried to follow the slides, but they do not make much sense alone. Here are some examples of things I do not understand. The article below the video states that "By co-locating the queries with the view code, the developer can reason about what a component is doing by looking at it in isolation" but nowhere in the tutorial treasure hunt application I see this in action. There is a single React component called App, and I fail to see where it declares its data dependencies. Moreover, according to the article, "Each component specifies its own data dependencies declaratively", but it seems that a core concept is that of mutation, which does not sound very declarative (although I am not sure I understand what that is exactly). The code for the mutation seems to access the this.props (which I assume live on the component). This looks like a cyclic dependency between components and mutations. The mutation also access a query over something called CheckHidingSpotForTreasurePayload which seems to be defined only in schema.json, although - if I understand correctly - that json is auto-generated. All of this leaves me confused, which is why I was asking for a more conceptual explation. In other words: given the aims expressed in the article you linked (declarative data dependencies and so on), what is the reasoning that lead to the actual design of Relay?

by pathsjs 11y ago

alexobenauer 11y ago

Nothing explains the motivations for Relay/GraphQL better than their introduction of it earlier this year, I'd recommend watching the video: http://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/02/20/introducing-relay-and-graphql.html http://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/02/20/introducing-...

pathsjs 11y ago
Is there anything in text format? I really cannot follow the whole video right now. I tried to follow the slides, but they do not make much sense alone. Here are some examples of things I do not understand. The article below the video states that "By co-locating the queries with the view code, the developer can reason about what a component is doing by looking at it in isolation" but nowhere in the tutorial treasure hunt application I see this in action. There is a single React component called App, and I fail to see where it declares its data dependencies. Moreover, according to the article, "Each component specifies its own data dependencies declaratively", but it seems that a core concept is that of mutation, which does not sound very declarative (although I am not sure I understand what that is exactly). The code for the mutation seems to access the this.props (which I assume live on the component). This looks like a cyclic dependency between components and mutations. The mutation also access a query over something called CheckHidingSpotForTreasurePayload which seems to be defined only in schema.json, although - if I understand correctly - that json is auto-generated. All of this leaves me confused, which is why I was asking for a more conceptual explation. In other words: given the aims expressed in the article you linked (declarative data dependencies and so on), what is the reasoning that lead to the actual design of Relay?