I was psyched to hear about GraphQL, but when I looked at it and found no apparent way to do joins... I wondered what the big deal is.
GraphQL kinda sucks
81–90 of 448 posts
Re: GraphQL kinda sucks
#82Comparing GQL to REST is like comparing a framework to a protocol. Of course it's easier to build up from REST, but if you're lucky enough that your project survives it won't be long before you're reimplementing the same GQL features you rubbished in a half-arsed way. In an ideal world, we can grow into the tech pulling in features as needed, but REST (in its modern form) is all about day 1 productivity, not day 100.
> if you're lucky enough that your project survives it won't be long before you're reimplementing the same GQL features you rubbished in a half-arsed way.
Unless you don't need those features to begin with? I also think with this mentality you'd end up with a lot of teams saying "lets do GQL in case we need it later" and it ends up being a ton of work for no benefit later.
Re: GraphQL kinda sucks
#83> It doesn't support map/tables/dictionaries.
I don't understand this point. Is this talking about implementing GraphQL on the backend? Because consuming GraphQL you get a map, you get JSON! Do you mean a more specific data structures like a Set or Stack?
Re: GraphQL kinda sucks
#84Whether it was the intention or not, I find GraphQL solved a fascinating problem: it let front end developers move faster by greatly decoupling their data needs from the backend developers. Backend developers describe the data model, expose it via graphql. Front end developers, often ones who never met those backend developers, can see the data model and just use it. They can change what they're querying on the fly,…
I thought it was supposed to do this, but then discovered that it has no way to express joins.
Has this been addressed? I don't see how you can decouple the back-end data from front-end queries without that.
Re: GraphQL kinda sucks
#85From what I've read GraphQL makes the most sense in the context of large scale teams and large databases. It introduces a large amount of overhead to your backend to parse queries, but allows those queries to be more flexible and not think about the database's schema which is a tremendous boon when you get to the scale where communication between teams is more expensive than implementation time. For junior and midlev…
Some libraries offer enterprise features for versioning.
Like you said it makes sense in larger companies. As a consumer of a well documented API it’s great, as someone who had to stitch together 2 microservices to provide the required data it sucks.
Re: GraphQL kinda sucks
#86It's not an unpopular opinion: it's true. Graphql is a terrible piece of software/paradigm. I've completely avoided it for years. If a potential new job contacts me and they use graphql, it's an immediate no from me. It's an immediate red flag that the engineering culture at the company is poorly run and would be a nightmare to work in. Run away, as fast as possible.
> Graphql is a terrible piece of software/paradigm. Says who, exactly? What data are you basing this on? Or is it a completely subjective opinion dictated by frustration likely caused by the lack of understanding of it?
Did you try reading the thread? What do you mean by data?
> Or is it a completely subjective opinion dictated by frustration likely caused by the lack of understanding of it?
You can ask this this very same question when people say graphql is an amazing piece of software/paradigm, except s/frustration/hype/
Re: GraphQL kinda sucks
#87Be careful with anyone with a take that says some technology is 100% bad always. Given enough experience / skill you can make any technology fairly enjoyable so I've only ever seen mixed reactions at worst from people giving things a fair try. GraphQL is a way to describe not only your API but also the entities and relationships in it. This enables certain useful things for client heavy applications, like cache norma…
>Be careful with anyone with a take that says some technology is 100% bad always. Given enough experience / skill you can make any technology fairly enjoyable so I've only ever seen mixed reactions at worst from people giving things a fair try.
So what does this mean?
You're saying that in the universe we live in there is absolutely nothing that is 100% bad always. Everything is good for something? There is no concept of bad or obsolete things because it's all good for something?
Let's restrict this to programming languages and frameworks and apis.
Are you saying that in the universe of ALL programming languages, ALL frameworks and all APIs, None of them are at all bad and they are all good for something?
I don't agree with this sentiment at all. In fact I think it's a sign of two possibilities:
1. that the person saying it is highly biased and unable to detect things that are genuinely bad.
2. The person saying it is just being temporarily illogical, there are clearly things in the programming world that are bad. He knows this but is so biased that he's incapable of processing this concept while promoting his favorite language/api/framework.
Scenario 2 is the most likely scenario here. Not saying graphQL is bad. But to love graphQL so much as to say Nothing in the universe is actually bad?
Let's be real, I am not against graphQL. However you cannot actually say that people against graphQL have invalid opinions because there is nothing in the programming universe that is definitively bad. This argument does not make any sense at all.
Re: GraphQL kinda sucks
#88It's not an unpopular opinion: it's true. Graphql is a terrible piece of software/paradigm. I've completely avoided it for years. If a potential new job contacts me and they use graphql, it's an immediate no from me. It's an immediate red flag that the engineering culture at the company is poorly run and would be a nightmare to work in. Run away, as fast as possible.
> It's an immediate red flag that the engineering culture at the company is poorly run and would be a nightmare to work in. Well, at least I'm glad I know I'll never be working with you! I'm not giving you shit because you don't like GraphQL, I'm giving you shit because of your asinine "if you use GraphQL your company is poorly run and a nightmare" comment. Whenever I see a comment from any developer that says "If yo…
Yep. I worked at a place that fired almost its entire programming staff because they insisted on using Visual C++ to build a CRUD app, while a team of contractors built a prototype in Visual Basic.
Needless to say, the VB app worked fine and became the product.
Re: GraphQL kinda sucks
#89Having worked in big tech and small startups, I think GraphQL is a brilliant way to solve an organizational problem that massive tech companies have. It's that the team maintaining the API is different from the team that needs changes to the API. Due to the scale of the organization the latter doesn't have the access or know-how to easily add fields to that API themselves, so they have to wait for the maintainers to…
If that field isn’t populated aren’t you in the exact same spot?
Re: GraphQL kinda sucks
#90Ignore all the noise and just use an RPC model between your backend and frontend. All these stupid trends and overengineered abstractions will come and go, but people will still be using plain RPC in 5, 10, 100, and 1000 years.
But before you use RPC, try rendering your markup on the server. That, too, reduces a lot of complexity.
and let all the non-browser clients parse html?