I’ve got to say, I have been trying out GraphQL and Apollo in a GRAND stack app on a new project and once you get up to speed with it it is an absolute pleasure

I’ve got to say, I have been trying out GraphQL and Apollo in a GRAND stack app on a new project and once you get up to speed with it it is an absolute pleasure to work with. Here’s some benefits and a bit of an overview of GraphQL and Apollo. First think of GraphQL as a competing ideology for REST API endpoints. With GraphQL, you only collect data you need which they say in terms of no over or under fetching of data happens. In making a request it is visibly apparent how your data is shaped meaning you know what properties would be defined when you chain them together. You have to create a schema and in this schema you define the types of each objects’ properties (this should not replace database schemas, but should basically define how data should enter and exit from your GraphQL endpoint to your client.) There are two types of schema types mainly ‘type’s which are models for data that can be queried and ‘input’s which are models for data that can be inputs for data creation and modifications. This leads to the only two types of queries namely ‘queries’ and ‘mutations’. There is also only a single endpoint for all types of queries including mutations, so you don’t have to try and remember all the different ones. I guess the equivalent of remembering routes is remembering the names of mutations you make, but this is aided by intellisense and the easily searchable schema from the playground. My favorite part is the tooling. For example the GraphQL playground which is provided by Apollo Server allows you to have the equivelant of intellisense for your queries it lists and autocompletes what properties are on a given branch/property of the type you are requesting. Another benefit to the playground is you can view and search your schema and follow links between different types. This tooling makes development pleasurable, and is no doubt able to be made due to the design decisions that GraphQL made. A few other neat things that I know are true of Apollo server but am not sure if they are in the GraphQL spec is that your return values from your resolvers (resolvers are like route handlers in rest, but they are specific to the types in your schema) become your response to your client. Asynchronous values (e.g. Promises) are waited on before being sent back as a response. Uncaught errors thrown in resolvers are automatically handled and sent back to the client. Overall it’s starting to make me like having more type safety than JavaScript typically has. Also using Apollo client with React is really nice and fills a good gap for adding model and controller layers to React’s view layer, so you don’t really need Redux or the like with Apollo client.