Matthew Lindfield Seager

Matthew Lindfield Seager

GraphQL vs(?) REST

I’ve been coming across a lot of GraphQL listenings/readings lately. Below is a small sampling and my very brief impressions.

The fourth link is the one that excites me most (spoiler, it’s not actually GraphQL).

  • Recent episode(s) of The Bikeshed, particularly episode 198 (and even more particularly, 1 minute starting at 15:24): I really like the idea of GraphQL helping them to ask the right questions - questions about business processes rather than just data flow and endpoints
  • Ruby on Rails 273 with Shawnee Gao from Square: Interesting use case but not really applicable in my situation
  • Evil Martians tutorial/blog post: Wow! That’s only part 1 and it already looks like a lot of work!!! And of the three benefits they mention (not overfetching, being strongly typed and schema introspection) the last two seem to come with pluses and minuses of their own
  • Remote Ruby with Lee Richmond from Bloomberg: Best of both worlds!?!? According to Lee, Graphiti offers GraphQL-like fetching but with a Rails-like RESTful approach that brings sensible, predictable conventions to API design.

Based on that last link I’m VERY keen to try out Graphiti (and friends):

I’m curious to know if Graphiti can offer the same benefit Chris Toomey mentioned that GraphQL offers of encouraging them to ask the right questions.