nope, it's meant for micro-service architecture where you have a lot of different api end-points spread across different servers, databases, technologies, shar

nope, it's meant for micro-service architecture where you have a lot of different api end-points spread across different servers, databases, technologies, shards, etc. So you need to get user profile from one side, and a list of news from the other, and then cross-reference that with a list of friends from the 3rd source, and then you need to combine all that together into something usable in the client. GraphQL is a way to define how to merge those datasets, without manually coding each step of taking field X from feed A and list Y from feed B and indexing them by Z. Beside obviously solving problems for huge players like FB, it also helps with common situations when UI design is being constantly changed along the way and all of the sudden front-end team needs APIs to return shitload of new relations that were not in initial specs. In most startups that I've worked on APIs 99% of my time was reworking queries to include more data because designers and UX people had changed their mind. GraphQL makes this fairly painless as long as you have a well defined set of basic APIs. Then later when the design gets more stable you can locate the bottlenecks and rework them into more complex, but faster API calls.