Facebook is not trying to kill REST. It just doesn't work well for their use-case. So, they make their own system that suits them better.
What's wrong with that?
Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
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Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#22One of the main advantages of Relay/GraphQL is that it lets front end devs iterate quickly without worrying about building new endpoints on the server side. Less context switching is a win when building out new features quickly.
Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#23tl;dr: lol.
The author is claiming Relay is a scheme to kill the open web. A simpler theory is just that Relay solves a problem Facebook (and many other people it seems) are having. The idea that REST has shortcomings for Facebook's use case is an unthinkable thought for the author.
No argument is given for why we should consider REST to be a foundation of the open web. REST != HTTP.
The post is full of logic-defying assertions like "Facebook wants to replace REST with Relay for the same reason they want to replace DOM engines with React Native."
Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#24I have a problem taking seriously any article that spreads FUD by accusing their targets of spreading FUD. The people who build React and the related ecosystem are incredibly smart people trying to make the web better. I'm certain there's no ill-intent in their motives. Regardless, they open source pretty aggressively. If an open technology from Facebook displaces another open technology from another source, I don't…
The web has been getting worst every year, mostly due to these companies spreading technologies to fix a web that is "broken" but who nobody but themselves complained about.
I agree wholeheartedly with OP, Facebook & cie might have problems with certain components of the web, but they are neither broken or in need of a fix, that it doesn't fit their need sure, but their needs are, well, theirs.
I can count on one hand the number of tech that came out in the past 5 or 6 years that are actually an improvement on the old if you are not Google or Facebook.
What OP should have said may be is, stop trying to pass your problems as everyones problems. 99.9% of the web can function with the way the web was 5 years ago, if not more. Hell I was operating at high scale using standard stacks 7 years ago and I don't see why or how the situation has changed at all to warrant any of the bullshit technologies that are constantly touted as a fix.
Developing for the web has become more of a nightmare than anything else because of the likes of Twitter, Facebook or Google pushing their stack on people who never needed it.
Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#25I have a problem taking seriously any article that spreads FUD by accusing their targets of spreading FUD. The people who build React and the related ecosystem are incredibly smart people trying to make the web better. I'm certain there's no ill-intent in their motives. Regardless, they open source pretty aggressively. If an open technology from Facebook displaces another open technology from another source, I don't…
They appear to be middle-level freelancers, where convincing your clients that you are really smart and making a lot of noise in social media is more important than actually being really smart. (I am also a freelancer, so i'm not trying to be snarky so much as point out the incentives, the article is clearly not meant for HN)
Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#26> a REST endpoint can return whatever you want. If you only want a subset of that graph, make an endpoint around that subset. So we have to make endpoints around every possible subset? > You want to avoid large object graphs anyway, for two reasons. Returning coarse-gained chunks of data tends to work against effective caching strategies, whether you're using REST, Relay, or anything else. You have to cache the whole…
> So we have to make endpoints around every possible subset?
Pretty much. GraphQL is conceptually the same as just letting your clients send an SQL query to your API. Relay seems a short step away from having a graph database engine running client side, a storage engine on the server and a remoting layer to glue them together.
Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#27I have to agree with this article. There is a tendency in tech to reinvent what we don't understand properly, and from experience of using third-party APIs (and from my own ignorance too) - HTTP is the thing we seem to know the least about (well actually one could argue TCP/IP is ...)
I read this article from top to bottom and I didn't feel the comments were extreme or purist. It did leave me thinking we need to spend more time learning and sharing knowledge of HTTP /REST than dismissing it.
Of course, the headline is clickbait - and that is the only real criticism I had.
Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
"So we have to make endpoints around every possible subset?" No, you use the query in querystring. One way or another you're offering a query interface. A lot of REST is just about how you offer the same interfaces you were planning on offering anyhow. Which is probably a source of a lot of the frustration REST advocates experience. If you're genuinely doing something that REST can't do very well, OK then, but if you…
> No, you use the query in querystring. Ok, but doing that straight on top of HTTP, will only cache queries that are exactly equal to previous ones. Not queries that are a subset of previous queries.
If the [data returned following a] query is a subset [of data points already returned] why do you need to get it again; if you actually need to re-retrieve it then it being cached is no use unless you dumped it from local cache mistakenly - that shouldn't be an often enough occurrence to need to cache the data. Or did I miss something?
Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#29Why is this upvoted so much? It's a complete strawman.
Facebook's own intro at https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/05/01/graphql-int... states:
"There is actually much debate about what exactly REST is and is not. We wish to avoid such debates. We are interested in the typical attributes of systems that self-identify as REST, rather than systems which are formally REST."
"We believe there are a number of weakness in typical REST systems"
The author of this article is talking about REST in general, while Facebook specifically is talking about typical implementations of it.
Re: Facebook Relay: An Evil And/Or Incompetent Attack on REST
#30I have a problem taking seriously any article that spreads FUD by accusing their targets of spreading FUD. The people who build React and the related ecosystem are incredibly smart people trying to make the web better. I'm certain there's no ill-intent in their motives. Regardless, they open source pretty aggressively. If an open technology from Facebook displaces another open technology from another source, I don't…
The web has been getting worst every year, mostly due to these companies spreading technologies to fix a web that is "broken" but who nobody but themselves complained about. I agree wholeheartedly with OP, Facebook & cie might have problems with certain components of the web, but they are neither broken or in need of a fix, that it doesn't fit their need sure, but their needs are, well, theirs. I can count on one han…
Are Facebook actually passing their own problems as everyone's? They're making technologies which suit their needs better, and other people can use them too, but they're not forcing them on anyone.