7 ms·

Build Better GraphQL APIs: Thinking in Graphs

98 points by mengledowl 9y ago

markjspivey 9y ago
Hypermedia (HATEOAS, REST, etc) is graph thinking as well. “endpoints” is not synonymous with “REST”, it is merely an address (likely paired with an expectation (or affordance).
dullgiulio 9y ago
This article could be as interesting as it gets, but opening the page yields a newsletter form with white background. I thought I opened an article, not a newsletter subscription. Who sane in their brain thinks this actually lead to new newsletter subscriptions? It's content hijacking.
- mikedelfino 9y ago
  > Who sane in their brain thinks this actually lead to new newsletter subscriptions? They probably have metrics showing so. Otherwise they really are insane.
  - GrinningFool 9y ago
    True. Much like spam, success rates - depending on the goals - can be measured in the low single-digit percentages. If you scare away 95% of folks but your target is harvesting 3% of visitors' email address, this is a successful approach. That's fine, to each his/her own. I'll stick with the 95% that ignore the prompt or (in my case) close the window when the screen blanks.
    - madamelic 9y ago
      I'd love to see the numbers on open rates of the emails he gets this way. (I am going to guess they are incredibly close to 0%). Let alone any conversion from the email.
- pas 9y ago
  > This article could be as interesting as it gets, No, unfortunately it's shit. Not even a worked out full example.
  - sorenbs 9y ago
    A few articles on the same topic: https://blog.graph.cool/thinking-in-terms-of-graphs-a9087423645 https://blog.graph.cool/thinking-in-terms-of-graphs-a9087423... https://dev-blog.apollodata.com/the-concepts-of-graphql-bc68bd819be3 https://dev-blog.apollodata.com/the-concepts-of-graphql-bc68... And a more full featured tutorial: https://www.howtographql.com/ https://www.howtographql.com/ Full disclosure - I'm the co-founder of Graphcool.
dmitriid 9y ago
> Stop Thinking In Endpoints > How To Start Thinking In Graphs Ok. I've started to think in graphs. You know. Neo4J, Tinkerpop Gremlin, all that. Oh, wait. How does that help me create that graph in a sane and meaningful way from a relational database and a number of microservices, especially if all the requests can be ad-hoc graph queries? Ah, yes. The article (and all other articles on GraphQL) never answer that, do they?
- ddorian43 9y ago
  You build a "query language" that translates the GraphQL into a series of calls to your nanoservices ?
  - 013a 9y ago
    We refer to them as picoservices, but yes.
  - dmitriid 9y ago
    Why would I want to do that though? :) It's quite an undertaking, increases the surface of bugs and attacks etc.
- cvburgess 9y ago
  There are really elegant solutions coming out around this - I suggest watching some of the talks from this years GraphQL summit.
- jonbarker 9y ago
  I propose that if you have tables and want graphs, you will have to consider the tradeoff in compute resources required to generate meaningful aggregate results (count all customers, etc). So the answer is usually keep your tables and use graphs when appropriate.
- taco_emoji 9y ago
  Yeah, IMO GraphQL is not at all hard to grok, and its benefits to an API consumer are pretty obvious. But I have no idea, as a developer, how I'm supposed to implement a GraphQL interface to my non-graphical database(s) in a secure, performant, and repeatable way.
weego 9y ago
I really appreciate when anyone is willing to share knowledge and experience on subjects... but in this case none of what is said has any real unique insight to graphs over just really really basic data modelling. Even just the notion of needing to think in graphs for GraphQL is really an unnecessary conflation of modelling theory and technical abstraction.
- manojlds 9y ago
  GraphQL is really badly named. It is just REST vNext and it confuses a lot of folks on what it means and how to use it.
donatj 9y ago
I was very disappointed to find out that GraphQL wasn’t a generalized query language and much more discreet manually defined API, more of a rest api pretending to be a query language. That is to say I can only filter in ways the API developer thought of, specifically blessed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazingly useful. A process that took us 40 seconds of back and forth with GitHub now takes less than one second.
- paulddraper 9y ago
  There is a balance between arbitrary queries and predermined queries. One the one hand, you need to be flexible. On the other, allowing any query no matter how horrendous can be bad for a public API. IMO, GraphQL strikes the perfect balance for a public API.
- obi1kenobi 9y ago
  I was very disappointed with the same thing! However, it is very easy to get rid of the resolver-based execution model and turn it into a generalized graph query language. We've done that at my company and it's been working well for us -- here's our blog post: https://blog.kensho.com/compiled-graphql-as-a-database-query-language-72e106844282 https://blog.kensho.com/compiled-graphql-as-a-database-query... We also open-sourced the GraphQL compiler code that lets us write graph queries: https://github.com/kensho-technologies/graphql-compiler https://github.com/kensho-technologies/graphql-compiler pip install graphql-compiler
- gnarbarian 9y ago
  Have you considered trying orientdb? http://orientdb.com http://orientdb.com
- hirundo 9y ago
  I'm implementing filtering in a graphql api now, on a sql backend (a fixed constraint). We decided we just can't support arbitrary filtering. Full table scans don't scale, and an index for every column is costly. So we'll support it only on indexed columns and add indexes selectively. If graphql did require arbitrary filtering it would be useless to us at this point.
- 9y ago
manigandham 9y ago
Blanking out the article and showing a newsletter signup form after less than 1 second on page = worthless. These tactics do not work, you just end up annoying readers and getting spam entries.
- nothrabannosir 9y ago
  Do they really not work? Every bi department I’ve ever heard running the numbers, so far, have been sorry to say they do. I’ve never met a company happy to put them in, either. It’s always “ugh, the numbers show big tick ups in engagement, we have to do this -.-“ Do you have different experiences?
  - manigandham 9y ago
    People do sign up for newsletters, but not before they even get a chance to read anything. It's a fine balance between value and trust. Business websites are different, usually with some important gated material behind an email signup but even then there is plenty of spam. Most marketing departments never bother to measure the bounce rate and attrition from these tactics so if all you look at are email signups, then of course it looks like it works.
    - madamelic 9y ago
      >People do sign up for newsletters, but not before they even get a chance to read anything. It's a fine balance between value and trust. There was an article that did it really well. I forget who it was but it was a good article about Mongo, about 1/2 - 2/3rds of the way through, it put a CTA and an email input box inline. It was obvious what it was, but didn't shove it in your face.
ChicagoDave 9y ago
This looks very much like an email farming site. The article is very thin.

98 points by mengledowl 9y ago

Hypermedia (HATEOAS, REST, etc) is graph thinking as well. “endpoints” is not synonymous with “REST”, it is merely an address (likely paired with an expectation (or affordance).

dullgiulio 9y ago

This article could be as interesting as it gets, but opening the page yields a newsletter form with white background. I thought I opened an article, not a newsletter subscription. Who sane in their brain thinks this actually lead to new newsletter subscriptions? It's content hijacking.

mikedelfino 9y ago
> Who sane in their brain thinks this actually lead to new newsletter subscriptions? They probably have metrics showing so. Otherwise they really are insane.
- GrinningFool 9y ago
  True. Much like spam, success rates - depending on the goals - can be measured in the low single-digit percentages. If you scare away 95% of folks but your target is harvesting 3% of visitors' email address, this is a successful approach. That's fine, to each his/her own. I'll stick with the 95% that ignore the prompt or (in my case) close the window when the screen blanks.
  - madamelic 9y ago
    I'd love to see the numbers on open rates of the emails he gets this way. (I am going to guess they are incredibly close to 0%). Let alone any conversion from the email.
pas 9y ago
> This article could be as interesting as it gets, No, unfortunately it's shit. Not even a worked out full example.
- sorenbs 9y ago
  A few articles on the same topic: https://blog.graph.cool/thinking-in-terms-of-graphs-a9087423645 https://blog.graph.cool/thinking-in-terms-of-graphs-a9087423... https://dev-blog.apollodata.com/the-concepts-of-graphql-bc68bd819be3 https://dev-blog.apollodata.com/the-concepts-of-graphql-bc68... And a more full featured tutorial: https://www.howtographql.com/ https://www.howtographql.com/ Full disclosure - I'm the co-founder of Graphcool.

dmitriid 9y ago

> Stop Thinking In Endpoints > How To Start Thinking In Graphs Ok. I've started to think in graphs. You know. Neo4J, Tinkerpop Gremlin, all that. Oh, wait. How does that help me create that graph in a sane and meaningful way from a relational database and a number of microservices, especially if all the requests can be ad-hoc graph queries? Ah, yes. The article (and all other articles on GraphQL) never answer that, do they?

ddorian43 9y ago
You build a "query language" that translates the GraphQL into a series of calls to your nanoservices ?
- 013a 9y ago
  We refer to them as picoservices, but yes.
- dmitriid 9y ago
  Why would I want to do that though? :) It's quite an undertaking, increases the surface of bugs and attacks etc.
cvburgess 9y ago
There are really elegant solutions coming out around this - I suggest watching some of the talks from this years GraphQL summit.
jonbarker 9y ago
I propose that if you have tables and want graphs, you will have to consider the tradeoff in compute resources required to generate meaningful aggregate results (count all customers, etc). So the answer is usually keep your tables and use graphs when appropriate.
taco_emoji 9y ago
Yeah, IMO GraphQL is not at all hard to grok, and its benefits to an API consumer are pretty obvious. But I have no idea, as a developer, how I'm supposed to implement a GraphQL interface to my non-graphical database(s) in a secure, performant, and repeatable way.

weego 9y ago

I really appreciate when anyone is willing to share knowledge and experience on subjects... but in this case none of what is said has any real unique insight to graphs over just really really basic data modelling. Even just the notion of needing to think in graphs for GraphQL is really an unnecessary conflation of modelling theory and technical abstraction.

manojlds 9y ago
GraphQL is really badly named. It is just REST vNext and it confuses a lot of folks on what it means and how to use it.

donatj 9y ago

I was very disappointed to find out that GraphQL wasn’t a generalized query language and much more discreet manually defined API, more of a rest api pretending to be a query language. That is to say I can only filter in ways the API developer thought of, specifically blessed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazingly useful. A process that took us 40 seconds of back and forth with GitHub now takes less than one second.

paulddraper 9y ago
There is a balance between arbitrary queries and predermined queries. One the one hand, you need to be flexible. On the other, allowing any query no matter how horrendous can be bad for a public API. IMO, GraphQL strikes the perfect balance for a public API.
obi1kenobi 9y ago
I was very disappointed with the same thing! However, it is very easy to get rid of the resolver-based execution model and turn it into a generalized graph query language. We've done that at my company and it's been working well for us -- here's our blog post: https://blog.kensho.com/compiled-graphql-as-a-database-query-language-72e106844282 https://blog.kensho.com/compiled-graphql-as-a-database-query... We also open-sourced the GraphQL compiler code that lets us write graph queries: https://github.com/kensho-technologies/graphql-compiler https://github.com/kensho-technologies/graphql-compiler pip install graphql-compiler
gnarbarian 9y ago
Have you considered trying orientdb? http://orientdb.com http://orientdb.com
hirundo 9y ago
I'm implementing filtering in a graphql api now, on a sql backend (a fixed constraint). We decided we just can't support arbitrary filtering. Full table scans don't scale, and an index for every column is costly. So we'll support it only on indexed columns and add indexes selectively. If graphql did require arbitrary filtering it would be useless to us at this point.
9y ago

manigandham 9y ago

Blanking out the article and showing a newsletter signup form after less than 1 second on page = worthless. These tactics do not work, you just end up annoying readers and getting spam entries.

nothrabannosir 9y ago
Do they really not work? Every bi department I’ve ever heard running the numbers, so far, have been sorry to say they do. I’ve never met a company happy to put them in, either. It’s always “ugh, the numbers show big tick ups in engagement, we have to do this -.-“ Do you have different experiences?
- manigandham 9y ago
  People do sign up for newsletters, but not before they even get a chance to read anything. It's a fine balance between value and trust. Business websites are different, usually with some important gated material behind an email signup but even then there is plenty of spam. Most marketing departments never bother to measure the bounce rate and attrition from these tactics so if all you look at are email signups, then of course it looks like it works.
  - madamelic 9y ago
    >People do sign up for newsletters, but not before they even get a chance to read anything. It's a fine balance between value and trust. There was an article that did it really well. I forget who it was but it was a good article about Mongo, about 1/2 - 2/3rds of the way through, it put a CTA and an email input box inline. It was obvious what it was, but didn't shove it in your face.

ChicagoDave 9y ago

This looks very much like an email farming site. The article is very thin.