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I went down the path of learning Relay instead of Apollo. I'm regretting this decision. Relay is too restrictive, and the relay compiler is far too sensitive fo

by pippy 9y ago

I went down the path of learning Relay instead of Apollo. I'm regretting this decision. Relay is too restrictive, and the relay compiler is far too sensitive for most server side endpoints.

clintonwoo 9y ago
What put the nail in the coffin to Relay for me was watching a talk by the dev team where they said they don't want to create proper documentation because they feel like that's creating a contract with the community to support the API. It's somewhere on YouTube sorry I can't find it now.
Rodeoclash 9y ago
Interesting. I've worked with Relay almost since its release, more recently on the modern branch, and haven't run into anything that's been too restrictive. You have an element of thinking about things in "Relay" terms (in the sense of how to structure them) but once you've figured that it then things just work (TM). I'm curious about the second part of your statement, the compiler being too sensitive for your server side endpoints, can you elaborate on that a bit?
- pippy 9y ago
  Sure. The first issue I came across was that the relay compiler expects a strict specification when mutating data, one that wasn't compatible with the server library I was using. Expect to write your own server side scaffolder to get around this. The second big issue was that relay modern decoupled the networking logic, so having a series of chained queries is something you either have to handle yourself or write your own networking logic for. And because creating dynamic queries can't be done with relay it's a bit annoying that this logic isn't handled automatically for you. My biggest gripe happens to be the lack of flexibility around dynamic queries. You can't define the data you want back at run time, which feels defeats a major point of GraphQL. Apollo supports dynamic queries with higher-order components. It might be a case of the grass looks greener on the other side, but I felt as soon as you try to do something bigger than a todo app with Relay you start to feel the restrictions.

by pippy 9y ago

I went down the path of learning Relay instead of Apollo. I'm regretting this decision. Relay is too restrictive, and the relay compiler is far too sensitive for most server side endpoints.

clintonwoo 9y ago

What put the nail in the coffin to Relay for me was watching a talk by the dev team where they said they don't want to create proper documentation because they feel like that's creating a contract with the community to support the API. It's somewhere on YouTube sorry I can't find it now.

Rodeoclash 9y ago

Interesting. I've worked with Relay almost since its release, more recently on the modern branch, and haven't run into anything that's been too restrictive. You have an element of thinking about things in "Relay" terms (in the sense of how to structure them) but once you've figured that it then things just work (TM). I'm curious about the second part of your statement, the compiler being too sensitive for your server side endpoints, can you elaborate on that a bit?

pippy 9y ago
Sure. The first issue I came across was that the relay compiler expects a strict specification when mutating data, one that wasn't compatible with the server library I was using. Expect to write your own server side scaffolder to get around this. The second big issue was that relay modern decoupled the networking logic, so having a series of chained queries is something you either have to handle yourself or write your own networking logic for. And because creating dynamic queries can't be done with relay it's a bit annoying that this logic isn't handled automatically for you. My biggest gripe happens to be the lack of flexibility around dynamic queries. You can't define the data you want back at run time, which feels defeats a major point of GraphQL. Apollo supports dynamic queries with higher-order components. It might be a case of the grass looks greener on the other side, but I felt as soon as you try to do something bigger than a todo app with Relay you start to feel the restrictions.