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Enjoy the full archive of posts on Production Ready GraphQL

Best Practices

A Guide to GraphQL Errors

Exploring the many ways to design errors in a GraphQL API

Marc-Andre Giroux

·14 min read

Performance

On GraphQL-to-SQL

GraphQL has a reputation for its N+1 problem which can often happen when implemented naively. This leads to many of us trying and thinking about how to solve the issue of data fetching with GraphQL in the most efficient way.

Marc-Andre Giroux

·7 min read

GraphQL

The GraphQL Sweet Spot

What are the best use cases for GraphQL? When should we look into something else instead? In this post, we take a look at GraphQL's Sweet Spot.

Marc-Andre Giroux

·8 min read

Schema Design

All About GraphQL Abstract Types

This post is a snippet from Production Ready GraphQL. It is part of an update I’m working on for the schema design chapter in version 1.3. I decided to release it publicly as well because this side of abstract types is not talked about very much, and the subtle differences between interfaces and unions are not always easy to grasp. Hope you enjoy!

Marc-Andre Giroux

·10 min read

GraphQL

The Biggest GraphQL Misconceptions

As GraphQL is gaining in popularity, misconceptions about how it works and what it provides are also growing. I demystify a lot of these misconceptions in detail in Production Ready GraphQL, but here’s a little top 3 list of misconceptions I see and hear around GraphQL these days.

Marc-Andre Giroux

·4 min read

Libraries

gqless or gqlful?

Recently, a new GraphQL javascript client was released called gqless. The idea is really cool and clever: instead of writing GraphQL queries, client write typescript code in their application, and queries are generated at runtime.

Marc-Andre Giroux

·6 min read

Book

Production Ready GraphQL is Now Available!

I’m really happy to announce that my book Production Ready GraphQL is now available!

Marc-Andre Giroux

·1 min read

Book

The Production Ready GraphQL Book is Coming Out March 23rd

I’m really happy to announce that my book Production Ready GraphQL is finally done and will be available on March 23rd!

Marc-Andre Giroux

·2 min read

Evolution

How Should We Version GraphQL APIs?

How do you version GraphQL APIs? The most common answer you’ll get these days is “you don’t”. If you’re like me when I first read that, you might be a little anxious about maintaining a version-less API or a bit skeptical of the approach. In fact, not only is this a common answer, but it’s listed as a feature of GraphQL itself on graphql.org

Marc-Andre Giroux

·12 min read

GraphQL

Why You Can’t Select All Fields on a Type in GraphQL

One of the most asked questions I see around GraphQL are “How do I select all the fields on a type?” and/or “is there a SELECT * equivalent in GraphQL?”. It makes sense: It can be a little annoying for a client to always be adding fields once they’re available. While the answer is unfortunately just “you can’t”, I’m here to tell you it’s for very good reasons, and that hopefully after reading this you won’t be wishing for this feature anymore!

Marc-Andre Giroux

·4 min read

Public APIs

Why We Don’t See Many Public GraphQL APIs

👋 I have just released an entire book on building GraphQL servers that goes into great detail on building GraphQL servers at scale: https://book.productionreadygraphql.com

Marc-Andre Giroux

·7 min read

Performance

Is GraphQL Still Relevant in an HTTP2 World?

This tweet by Phil Sturgeon a week or so ago stirred the pot of a lot of GraphQL enthusiasts.

Marc-Andre Giroux

·8 min read

API

Some Thoughts on “Design First” API Development

API descriptions/schemas have been more and more of an obvious choice for companies wanting to build serious APIs. For readers that are used to my GraphQL posts, this may not be much of a surprise to you, since GraphQL inherently comes with a typed schema. For other HTTP APIs, an API description or schema has not always been adopted, and multiple choices have been available, probably explaining the fact not all APIs have descriptions along them. This might also explain the way some people debate GraphQL vs REST over the typed schema, even though nowadays it’s possible for all HTTP APIs to have a schema.

Marc-Andre Giroux

·7 min read

Performance

Why GraphQL Performance Monitoring is Hard 📈

This post is a preview of Production Ready GraphQL, a book I recently released on building GraphQL servers that goes into great detail on building GraphQL servers at scale: https://book.productionreadygraphql.com

Marc-Andre Giroux

·6 min read

Documentation

Careful about the GraphQL Burger 🍔

A while ago a tweet containing this image got pretty viral in the REST & GraphQL communities. Not only it got viral but it got pretty intense, with people arguing back in forth if this image above is a good thing or not for GraphQL. I have to admit it annoyed me a little. A lot of people in REST & GraphQL communities are heavily invested in one or another and have trouble having nuanced opinions. The second thing is that an analogy can only go so far, and at some point it falls apart when trying to have a productive analogy. The person who tweeted this definitely did not want all this unwarranted attention, so I won’t mention them here just in case. This post is not about this tweet specifically, but a discussion around the concerns that were discussed after.

Marc-Andre Giroux

·4 min read

Performance

The GraphQL Dataloader Pattern: Visualized

This post is an early preview of Production Ready GraphQL, a book I recently released on building GraphQL servers that goes into great detail on building GraphQL servers at scale: https://book.productionreadygraphql.com Check it out if you enjoy this kind of content!

Marc-Andre Giroux

·9 min read

Distributed GraphQL

Is GraphQL a great choice for East-West Service Communication?

GraphQL is gaining a lot of momentum and the community is trying to apply it to pretty much every problem on earth 🌎 In this post, we’ll try to see if it’s a good match for one of these problems, service-to-service communication!

Marc-Andre Giroux

·6 min read

Schema Design

The tension between data & use-case driven GraphQL APIs

If you’ve been following my posts over the past months and even years, you know how important I think it is to design well crafted GraphQL schemas that express real use cases. When in doubt, designing a GraphQL schema for behaviors instead of for data has been my go-to rule. An older post on “Anemic Mutations” explains my rationale behind that principle.

Marc-Andre Giroux

·5 min read

Distributed GraphQL

The rise of GraphQL “Overambitious API gateways”

The API gateway space is filled with vendor solutions and is super competitive in general. Most of them specifically tackle problems related to endpoint based APIs, and surprisingly I haven’t seen that much of them appear when it comes to GraphQL gateway. Besides the Apollo Gateway, we haven’t seen that many vendor solutions propose a solution to the problem, even though we see it being covered a lot in talks and blog posts. I’m actually surprised big cloud vendors haven’t jumped on this yet (AWS has AppSync, but no general purpose GraphQL gateway yet). I have a strong feeling we’ll see some of those appear soon and if you’ve seen recent talks of mine you might know already I have some concerns on how we should design these. The perfect way to describe my feelings is actually a piece from the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar:

Marc-Andre Giroux

·3 min read

Intro

Where we Come From: An Honest Introduction to GraphQL

This post is a preview of my upcoming book on GraphQL schema design, it provides an introduction to GraphQL by starting back in time to understand what problems GraphQL is really trying to solve, and why it was designed this way. If you’re interested in learning more about the book, I would really appreciate if you signed up for the newsletter: https://book.graphqlschemadesign.com/

Marc-Andre Giroux

·15 min read

GraphQL

Backend For Frontends, Optimized Server Adapters, and GraphQL

Building APIs at scale, especially as the number of use cases and different clients grows large, poses a number of problems. This is especially true when your domain grows large, and different clients need to get data from a lot different bounded-contexts, in different ways.

Marc-Andre Giroux

·4 min read

Distributed GraphQL

On GraphQL Schema Stitching & API Gateways

I’ve been thinking a lot on GraphQL “Schema Stitching” these days. At its core, Schema Stitching is the art of composing multiple GraphQL Schemas into one GraphQL Schema. As you can imagine, this can be great in a service oriented architecture, where each team would take care of a part of the schema, iterating quickly on it, and at run time, some sort of API gateway would “stitch” all these schemas to present a single API to clients.

Marc-Andre Giroux

·9 min read

Schema Design

GraphQL Interfaces: Not Just Bags of Fields

GraphQL interface types are a powerful construct. At its core, an interface type exposes a certain set of fields that a type must respond to if it implements the interface. This lets us create fields of interface types, meaning that the objects returned by the fields could be any object type that implements the interface.

Marc-Andre Giroux

·4 min read

Evolution

Continuous Evolution & GraphQL: A Double-Edged Sword

When GraphQL was released a few years ago, every blog post, talk or announcement always included the fact that GraphQL prides itself on not using the typical API versioning to manage changes, and that in fact, the “GraphQL way” was more about Continuous Evolution. I find Phil Sturgeon describes this well:

Marc-Andre Giroux

·5 min read

Schema Design

GraphQL Mutation Design: Batch Updates

Welcome to another post on GraphQL Mutation Design. In an other post on designing static friendly mutations , we talked about how sometimes accepting plural arguments makes our life simpler:

Marc-Andre Giroux

·4 min read

Schema Design

GraphQL Mutation Design: Hypermedia GraphQL API

Over the past few days I’ve been posting about designing mutations in GraphQL. They are often tricky to get right, even more so in a Public API setting. The first post was about what I called Anemic Mutations, and the second one was about designing Static-Friendly Mutations.

Marc-Andre Giroux

·6 min read

Schema Design

GraphQL Mutation Design: Static-Friendly Mutations

This is a new post in my GraphQL Mutation Design series. Last week, we talked about what I called Anemic Mutations. This week, we’re touching a new subject: How to design mutations so that clients can use the power of static queries.

Marc-Andre Giroux

·4 min read

Schema Design

GraphQL Mutation Design: Anemic Mutations

Mutations are one of the trickiest part of a GraphQL schema to design. We spend a lot of time talking about GraphQL queries and how easy they are to use. However, mutations get far less love.

Marc-Andre Giroux

·5 min read

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