4 ms·

I have pretty limited experience with graphql. Why is apollos offering interesting to people? A hosted graphql proxy? You still need to write your own servers(b

• lyu07282 4y ago
  I don't know about the company or how they make money with it (support?), but Apollo is pretty much the standard GraphQL client for frontends. It has pretty sophisticated cache and state management, type generation for typescript, etc.
  • andrewingram 4y ago
    It’s arguably the least sophisticated of the major clients (Apollo, Urql, Relay), but they’ve done a great job with marketing and documentation. But I’ve personally never used it in a real project because Relay has always existed and I know how to use it.
    • nonethewiser 4y ago
      And for the server? What do you use instead of Apollo?
      • andrewingram 4y ago
        Depends on language, I've build GraphQL servers in a few, though mostly JavaScript and Python. For Python I used to use Graphene, these days I use Strawberry. For JavaScript, I originally used graphql-js and express-graphql, as these were the original libraries and I was a literal day 1 adopter. All the libraries are essentially just wrappers around graphql-js, so it's still viable to use directly. But for schema-building I now use Pothos (https://pothos-graphql.dev/ https://pothos-graphql.dev/), I'd probably use graphql-helix as the http layer (https://github.com/contra/graphql-helix https://github.com/contra/graphql-helix).
      • dventimihasura 4y ago
        https://supabase.com/blog/pg-graphql https://supabase.com/blog/pg-graphql https://www.graphile.org/postgraphile/ https://www.graphile.org/postgraphile/ https://hasura.io/ https://hasura.io/
        • andrewingram 4y ago
          Personally I wouldn’t advocate for these as I don’t believe it’s a good idea to automatically generate a GraphQL schema based on your database (I haven’t worked on anything in years where this would’ve been a good idea). But YMMV as always.
          • dventimihasura 4y ago
            Can you give reasons for why you believe that?
            • andrewingram 4y ago
              In a world where you have multiple clients, you want to minimise duplicate work of derived state. Unless your UI-level data model is 1-1 with your persistence layer (rare, in my experience), there’ll need to be a transformation somewhere, and since your GraphQL server provides a common interface for UI clients, this transformation should happen at or below the GraphQL layer.
              • dventimihasura 4y ago
                I'm trying to follow you. Are you saying that different UIs should (or may) have different data models, which themselves are different from but still derived from and related to the persisted data model?
                • andrewingram 4y ago
                  Say you have a web app, an iOS app and an android app. And let’s say the model of the data that makes sense for the purposes being the UI for these apps is different from the model that’s used to persist data in the database. It means somewhere between the database and the UI template you’re going to be transforming from one model to another. What you don’t want to do is have the equivalent transformation implemented 3 times — once per app; instead you want to do this transform at or below the common interface that they call operate against, ie the GraphQL server. In my experience it’s very uncommon for anything other than simple prototypes to not have at least some divergence between the UI model and the persistence model.
• edude03 4y ago
  Managed schema evolution mostly. Essentially git branches for your schema, that you can't merge if it would break your clients.
• csomar 4y ago
  What these companies offer (another one I am using is "The Guild") is mostly tooling and DEX. GraphQL is a specification. The implementation will depend on the tools/infra you'll use. That's what these guys offer.
• alexgrover 4y ago
  In addition to the other comments, their APM platform is built specifically for graphql so it includes things like query performance on the field level. Existing tools don’t always play nicely since a graphql server is usually just one endpoint and doesn’t use normal status codes. They also provide libraries for both the client and server so they can tell you what versions of your client are using specific data.