Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
If you’ve been building with GraphQL, you likely know how essential good schema design is. As the entry-point to all your GraphQL operations, it’s desirable to design a schema that’s easy to understand and work with, serves the needs of our clients today, and can be changed to fit their needs tomorrow.
This article teaches about the supergraph, platform thinking, and why it’s key to designing your graph for extensibility. We also discuss considerations that make federated schema design different from the monolithic approach. Finally, we cover the macro-level principles that help us design extensible and maintainable federated graphs.
Building schemas are a key part of building a graph. Schemas are one of the major benefits of using GraphQL. The schema defines how clients can retrieve data from your GraphQL API. With schemas, you can easily shape and evolve your data to fit your specific business, product, or project needs. If you’re new to the GraphQL world, you might be wondering how you can build flexible and evolvable schemas.
In this article, we’ll go over some principles to keep in mind when designing your own GraphQL schema. Before getting started, here are a few things you should know:
In case you are completely new to GraphQL, I will recommend you to start with our Introduction to GraphQL or GraphQL Core Concepts
A schema is the core component of a GraphQL application. It defines the capabilities of the GraphQL application. To elaborate further, a GraphQL schema is like a description of the data available from your application. It also defines the various queries and mutations that clients can use to interact with the server. In a way, the schema is the heart of a GraphQL application.
GraphQL is a remarkable tool to build APIs. However, it is quite different from REST. This can make it difficult for developers who have been accustomed to working with REST. There are some core concepts of GraphQL that are important to understand how GraphQL actually works.
We will be covering those core concepts in this post. However, if you are completely new to GraphQL, you should start with our Introduction to GraphQL and then, return to this post.
According to the GraphQL Foundation, GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data. Like many influential technologies, GraphQL was developed by Facebook in 2012. In their own words they “needed a data-fetching API powerful enough to describe all of Facebook, yet simple enough to be easy to learn” by their developers.
For a few years, GraphQL was used internally for their mobile applications. The first GraphQL repos were open-sourced in 2015. One of the Github repos contained the GraphQL specification and another contained a GraphQL JavaScript reference implementation.
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.
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.
No other language manifests Edsger Djikstra's notion of brevity without jargon better than GraphQL. This is a querying language that has proven its worth by its simplicity and effortlessness in an application of what would otherwise be heavy and ugly in the domain of API calls and database querying. As I was exploring the capabilities of this querying language, I was quick to realize its potential in its main use as an API building tool. I also realized that its benefits are greatly underrated, and thus made it my aim with this piece to stress on the advantages of GraphQL as well as introduce its importance in the realm of serverless which is greatly aided by AWS AppSync.
AWS AppSync itself is a powerful application development service that allows you to create services using GraphQL. It truly does justice to the abilities of GraphQL and after personally using it to build a simple API, I can not imagine developing API’s with a serverless framework in any other way. Released in 2017, AppSync has several features that ease the use of GraphQL and again, I strongly feel that the value of these features is greatly underrated or simply not known due to the novelty of the service.