A lot of people use GraphQL. Like everything else, there's pros and cons. If you've invested highly into a certain tool you're going to see all of the pains.
Ask HN: If GraphQL Is So Great, Why Doesn't Everyone Use It Already?
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: Ask HN: If GraphQL Is So Great, Why Doesn't Everyone Use It Already?
#12Because REST works, and I just wanna get on with solving actual business problems that make money, NOT play around with GraphQL
Re: Ask HN: If GraphQL Is So Great, Why Doesn't Everyone Use It Already?
#13I find it to be more complex(Hence more error prone), less performant, harder to resolve bugs. For a queries and mutations you still need to write business-logic and database access which is very similar to how you would develop a REST-API.
On the performance side, there is definitely the N+1 problem which is solved (partially) by the data loader pattern. But curious if the benefits vs tradeoffs is in favour of GraphQL? And have you considered tools like Hasura/Postgraphile that take care of boilerplate CRUD APIs for databases? Then you actually just focus on writing business logic.
I actually don't use GraphQL in my current position, so I don't think to much about it any more. Intresting tools which I might consider in the future(If I have to write GraphQL).
Re: Ask HN: If GraphQL Is So Great, Why Doesn't Everyone Use It Already?
#14GraphQL basically a layer that hides data federation from the client.
Re: Ask HN: If GraphQL Is So Great, Why Doesn't Everyone Use It Already?
#15Graphql offers benefits for a few types of architecture (typically microservices or when you are supporting multiple clients such as Android/iOS clients). If you don't have these, then Graphql primarily adds complexity
Re: Ask HN: If GraphQL Is So Great, Why Doesn't Everyone Use It Already?
#16GraphQL basically a layer that hides data federation from the client.
Would this benefit encourage you to use GraphQL as your backend/data api layer?
Re: Ask HN: If GraphQL Is So Great, Why Doesn't Everyone Use It Already?
#17In my opinion, graphql is a good detector of companies that want to be "cool" and thinks that they do software well as they follow dogmatically things like clean code.
But that are not pragmatic and so they don't realize the bad side effects of it. Often early stage startups.
Graphql is a typical example of something that is nice on paper but doesn't pass the reality check.
Re: Ask HN: If GraphQL Is So Great, Why Doesn't Everyone Use It Already?
#18In my opinion, graphql is a good detector of companies that want to be "cool" and thinks that they do software well as they follow dogmatically things like clean code. But that are not pragmatic and so they don't realize the bad side effects of it. Often early stage startups. Graphql is a typical example of something that is nice on paper but doesn't pass the reality check.
Explain whether you're cynical on the frontend or backend
Re: Ask HN: If GraphQL Is So Great, Why Doesn't Everyone Use It Already?
#19There’s an inherent amount of complexity with two (or more) systems talking to each other over a network. You can shift the balance from one to the other, but it’s always there.
GraphQL pushes complexity into the backend where it’s arguably easier to manage, in return the frontend can have more flexibility and autonomy as a client.
REST pushes the complexity to the frontend requiring clients to orchestrate multiple calls, and reconcile the data models in the API to their own.
GraphQL got a lot of early praise for having good tooling that can provided end-to-end type safety, autogenerated client and server frameworks, and so on. OpenAPI has more or less caught up on this front now.
You can’t just take a REST api and convert it into a GraphQL api. Like going from dynamic to static types, with GraphQL it pays off to define your data model and reuse it throughout the API.
I’ve seen simple things like using the same field name, or same set of fields for a given type get bikeshedded for months. You can get with this for REST APIs, but not GraphQL.
Re: Ask HN: If GraphQL Is So Great, Why Doesn't Everyone Use It Already?
#20In my opinion, graphql is a good detector of companies that want to be "cool" and thinks that they do software well as they follow dogmatically things like clean code. But that are not pragmatic and so they don't realize the bad side effects of it. Often early stage startups. Graphql is a typical example of something that is nice on paper but doesn't pass the reality check.
"doesn't pass the reality check" Can you elaborate on that? We're thinking of migrating to it from plain REST.