Cloud

Understanding GraphQL engine implementations | InfoWorld


When we talk about advantages of GraphQL we often hear one-liners such as “only fetch what you need,” “only requires one generic endpoint,” “data source agnostic,” or “more flexibility for developers.” But as always things are more subtle than a one-liner could ever describe.

Generic and flexible are the key words here and it’s important to realize that it’s hard to keep generic APIs performant. Performance is the number one reason that someone would write a highly customized endpoint in REST (e.g. to join specific data together) and that is exactly what GraphQL tries to eliminate. In other words, it’s a tradeoff, which typically means we can’t have the cake and eat it too. However, is that true? Can’t we get both the generality of GraphQL and the performance of custom endpoints? It depends!

Let me first explain what GraphQL is, and what it does really well. Then I’ll discuss how this awesomeness moves problems toward the back-end implementation. Finally, we’ll zoom into different solutions that boost the performance while keeping the generality, and how that compares to what we at Fauna call “native” GraphQL, a solution that offers an out-of-the-box GraphQL layer on top of a database while keeping the performance and advantages of the underlying database.

GraphQL is a specification

Before we can explain what makes a GraphQL API “native,” we need to explain GraphQL. After all, GraphQL is a multi-headed beast in the sense that it can be used for many different things. First things first: GraphQL is, in essence, a specification that defines three things: schema syntax, query syntax, and a query execution reference.

Schema syntax: Describes your data and API (the schema)

The schema simply defines what your data looks like (attributes and types) and how it can be queried (query name, parameters, and return types). For example, a todo application could have Todos and a List of todos, if it only provides one way to read this data — e.g., get a list of todos via the id, then that schema would look like this:

// todo-schema.gql
type Todo {
   title: String!
   completed: Boolean!
   list: List
}

type List {
   title: String!
   todos: [Todo] @relation
}

type Query {
   getList(id: ID): List!
}

Query syntax: Specifies how you can query

Once you have a schema that defines how your data and queries look, it’s super easy to retrieve data from your GraphQL endpoint. Do you want a list? Just call the getList item and specify what attributes of the list you want to return.



READ SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.