Netlify Graph: A faster way for teams to develop web apps with APIs

One of the founders of OneGraph here, happy to answer any questions or talk about ideas!

This is what we have been working on since the Netlify acquisition https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29253069. Still early days and in beta, but excited to see all the DX pieces coming together bit by bit!

When we did our original Launch HN (back in summer 2018! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17602951) this was one of the primary use-cases we had in mind. GraphQL provides such a rich layer for API tooling, but bringing it all together from a developer's point of view can be pretty challenging. Hopefully this spin on it (and the built-in integrations we're rolling out for specific frameworks) should make it significantly easier.

Lots of plans (a pure vscode workflow is high on my personal wishlist), but it's time to share the current state of things with all of you folks!

From having maintained 60+ API integrations for a B2B business, I can see how Netlify Graph (or previously OneGraph) solves a real problem.

The initial integration is usually straightforward, but the maintanence of these seemingly simple API wrappers is what bites back in the long run.

With having lots of integrations, these are the usual failure points:

1. Teams find it hard to keep track of all the changelogs across APIs.

2. Failing at [1] means that API changes get noticed much later and having to cram the work into product development cycles.

Ah, then you're in luck! Down the road, you should be able to tell Netlify Graph how to map the boilerplate-y bits from the API to the screen, so you always get something that works (with your best practices implemented) that you can start tweaking from.

We already do this for a handful of frameworks (plain functions, next.js, remix, etc.). Here's a bit of an older example (with a much older UI) of how it works with a very plain project mapping various GraphQL operations to next.js https://youtu.be/0LJr15A0t4Y?t=73, including

  - client-side forms
  - server-side form validation
  - auto-detecting when the user needs to log into a service client-side to do some query/action
  - prompting the user to log into the service
  - re-running the query on successful login

Basically, you should be able to click around in an API, run a test query, say, "Oh, I want that in my app", then click a button and have it inserted exactly how you and your team would have written it.

Congrats Sean!

This is awesome. I've been abusing Zapier for years now as a middle layer to integrate with 3rd parties without having to implement their APIs. Zapier's UI is built for non-technical users, anad it makes a lot of advanced use cases very cumbersome to implement.. Super excited to try reimplementing some of our more complicated zaps with this!

Are you all planning to implement as extensive of a collection of integrations as Zapier has?