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Since its release in 2015, GraphQL has become the alternative to REST. It gives frontend developers the flexibility they had craved for for so long.
Over are the days of begging backend developers for one-purpose-endpoints. Now a query can define all the data that is needed and request it in one go, cutting latency down considerably.
GraphQL is revolutionising the way developers build APIs. It lets you query precisely what you want. Nothing more, nothing less! It also gives you the flexibility to query related objects in a single round trip, unlike REST APIs.
In this blog post, we are going to experience GraphQLize, a JVM library for developing a GraphQL API instantly from Postgres and MySQL databases.
In Pixly, we are using Django as our backend due to the excellent data science libraries and the great community in the Python ecosystem. However, when we have decided to make the frontend app as a single-page-application with React, we faced many difficulties. We hope that our tutorial will help newcomers a bit for solving their future problems.
People who follow this tutorial should have at least an elementary level of knowledge about Python and a basic level of knowledge Django framework. Also, the basic level of Javascript and React is a must.
When discussing API design, REST or Representational State Transfer is what comes to mind first. It is a standard tool used for data retrieval from the server that accesses data by URLs.
Client applications whilst progressing into the new millennium was relatively simple. That is when REST had been developed and it became a good fit for many applications in due course of time.
GraphQL is a technology that helps developers across the board to build more robust software more quickly. The ability to request all of the information you need in a single request is a game-changer. It has simplified my backend development of APIs for consumption by mobile and web applications that would normally rely on RESTful APIs. A normal RESTful API may have several endpoints for various entities (e.g. users, submissions, etc.); with GraphQL, you can get all of this information in a single go using GraphQL's query language, also known as GQL.
GraphQL is a query language for APIs. Generally, while making REST endpoints in our APIs, the normal trend is to make an endpoint for a requirement. Let's say your endpoint is returning a list of employees, and each employee has general properties, such as name, age, and address (suppose address is another model mapped to the employee in such a way that each employee has an address). Now, at one point in time, you require data only for their address i.e. a list of all addresses in the database (only country, city, and street). For this, you will require an all-new endpoint in your service.
Here comes the power of GraphQL, which lets you deal with only a single endpoint and that changes its output based on the body of the request. Each request will call the same endpoint but with a different RequestBody. It will receive only the result that it requires.