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GraphQL kinda sucks

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Re: GraphQL kinda sucks

#111

Post by deltasevennine »

Kaze404 wrote: post #103
deltasevennine wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 concep…

The point is that “bad” isn’t a useful descriptor of anything regarding their real-life applications, because it simply doesn’t mean anything. Without more context, saying something is bad is just saying you dislike it with intent to present it as objective rather than subjective. For example: 1) “Haskell is bad because it’s too theoretical” 2) “Haskell is bad in corporate environments, as its roots in mathematical a…

Hard disagree.

>The point is that “bad” isn’t a useful descriptor of anything regarding their real-life applications, because it simply doesn’t mean anything.

This is just a complicated way of saying "Bad things have no meaning and don't exist in the universe."

Without getting too pedantic, in general, nobody agrees with this concept. Sure if you get pedantic you may find a couple people in this world who enjoy punching themselves in the face, but in general the overwhelming majority agree that punching yourself in the face is a pretty bad thing.

Note: Punching yourself in the face is just an example of a universally "bad" thing. I'm not personally against punching yourself in the face, it's just something I came up with while writing this.

Re: GraphQL kinda sucks

#113

Post by platz »

vikR0001 wrote: post #107
NonNefarious wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can do something like this. This query can be created and run on the client: ``` const SAMPLE_JOIN_QUERY = gql` query ($main_data_id: String!) { mainData( main_data_id: $main_data_id) { id main_data_field_1 main_data_field_2 main_data_field_3 related_data{ related_data_field_1 related_data_field_2 related_data_field_3 } } } `; ```

in other words, it's up to the folks writing the resolvers to manifest and implement that join as a nested field.

Re: GraphQL kinda sucks

#114

Post by Kaze404 »

cudgy wrote: post #70
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You are right that this arrogant attitude is juvenile, but it is prevalent amongst humans in all areas. Unfortunately, there would be few developers to work with if you apply the policy of not working with arrogant, dogmatic developers.

There’s this stereotype of a programmer, that while I think can be funny sometimes, still reflects a professional that doesn’t really exist anymore from my perspective.

Most software engineers I’ve worked with have been incredibly humble and dedicated. The mythical bearded guy that showers three times a day, comes to the office with shorts and flip flops, and refuses to install Windows on the accountant person’s machine because it’s objectively bad is something I’ve only seen in memes and stories from older people I’ve worked with.

I personally think dissolving this myth, along with the one that programming is easy and / or none of us know what we’re doing, should be a shared goal between people who care about what they do and how others perceive it. Otherwise we’re unknowingly cultivating it into existence, and I definitely don’t want to work with arrogant, dogmatic developers.

Re: GraphQL kinda sucks

#115

Post by BLanen »

Graphql gets hyped by people who have seriously no idea what the hard problems in apis are.

It quite literally solves many easy issues and pretends solve the hard ones, but does nothing to actually do this and just says that you "can".

I designed a typical JSON api that had customizable fields and filters and joins and authorization on orm level on classes(could easily be extended to do authorization on fields of the orm classes.) This was years before Graphql came along and pretends to solve these issues, while actually just leaving them up to the implementor of the resolvers. As if the idea itself of resolving per fields in so special.

And then you have people that think graphql = the semantic web(web3 before crypto shit stole the term). Inventing the same cyberpunk dreams from 40 years ago...

Nobody is even actually doing REST, just Rpcs over http with json. If they read the REST paper they'd know this is what they actually want but I fear it's a pipedream.

Re: GraphQL kinda sucks

#116

Post by _3u10 »

vikR0001 wrote: post #96
jonhohle wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that field isn’t populated aren’t you in the exact same spot?

Let's say you need to get a field back that is already in the database table, but that wasn't previously returned by the GraphQL endpoint. All you have to do on the front end is ask for it and GraphQL will populate it for you on the server.

For external users of the API this can be quite helpful when you’re looking for the password column on the users table.

For some reason I don’t think graphql actually works this way. Can’t quite put my finger on why allowing access to any column on a table might be a really bad idea.

Re: GraphQL kinda sucks

#117

Post by krschultz »

- It shifts the complexity where it belongs - out of native apps deployed to user's phones and onto the backend that you control. It doesn't eliminate any complexity.

- There's really no need for API versioning in GraphQL. Just keep iterating on the fields.

Re: GraphQL kinda sucks

#118

Post by Kaze404 »

deltasevennine wrote: post #111
Kaze404 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that “bad” isn’t a useful descriptor of anything regarding their real-life applications, because it simply doesn’t mean anything. Without more context, saying something is bad is just saying you dislike it with intent to present it as objective rather than subjective. For example: 1) “Haskell is bad because it’s too theoretical” 2) “Haskell is bad in corporate environments, as its roots in mathematical a…

Hard disagree. >The point is that “bad” isn’t a useful descriptor of anything regarding their real-life applications, because it simply doesn’t mean anything. This is just a complicated way of saying "Bad things have no meaning and don't exist in the universe." Without getting too pedantic, in general, nobody agrees with this concept. Sure if you get pedantic you may find a couple people in this world who enjoy punch…

Maybe I failed to express myself properly, but my point is that saying “X is bad.” (emphasis on the period) is not really saying anything. It’s much more productive if you explain why, how and in what environment X is bad, either before or after, like I did in example #2.

In my experience when someone says “X is bad”, the response is often either “haha” (which the subject then changes), or “why” (which leads to person #1 actually saying what they want to say). I’m personally not interested in someone’s remarks about some technology completely devoid of context or nuance, and would rather hear about their opinion on such technology in tangible scenarios.

Re: GraphQL kinda sucks

#119

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

cudgy wrote: post #70
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You are right that this arrogant attitude is juvenile, but it is prevalent amongst humans in all areas. Unfortunately, there would be few developers to work with if you apply the policy of not working with arrogant, dogmatic developers.

Strongly disagree, primarily because when this type of attitude infects dev teams it is usually a cultural issue, not an individual one.

The primary, inviolable value I have, and look for, in dev teams is "strong opinions, loosely held". Meaning I want to work with engineers that have the experience, motivation and intelligence to have strong opinions about how things should be done, but it's also critically important that developers are humble enough to know other developers may have other experiences that can inform why a different decision can be better.

If you've worked in a dev team that embodies this attitude, you know how great it can be and how dev team members will naturally work to strongly defend the group dynamic that it fosters. Meaning if a developer with a bit too much arrogance joins the team, they can often be trained into not having to be so judgemental, or making disagreements about real issues and not emotional arguments ("GraphQL sucks and you're stupid if you use it") If not, the existing team will quickly reject that arrogant developer because they know how dangerous they can be to a healthy group dynamic.

Re: GraphQL kinda sucks

#120

Post by krschultz »

philliphaydon wrote: post #51

> It can save you bandwidth. Get what you ask for and no more I feel like this a false truth. Most people are building a web app, or a mobile app and consuming an api and displaying all the data they retrieve. If you have an rest api which returns an object with 6 properties. And a graphQl scheme which returns those same 6 properties. You’re not saving anything. Now if you have a website and a mobile app, where the m…

Every company I've worked for in the last 10 years had multiple apps across several platforms, each with many versions, all running in production at once. Even if you only care about the next version you are shipping and a handful in production that's a dozen variations.

In a REST paradigm you over fetch because not all of these variations need the same data, or you send less but then the clients thicker because they merge API calls and have divergent presentation logic, or you have a bajillion API versions.

There's often a lot of back and forth between the various teams for each rev of the API.

GraphQL lets the clients drive the definition of the data fetching. That's it.

95% of the criticism of GraphQL is people complaining that GraphQL doesn't solve the problem of preparing the API response for these different requests. While that's true, that's not what it's supposed to provide. Whether you have a REST API with 26 versions or a GraphQL API with 26 variations of query you're going to have to write a backend-for-frontend style service that resolves the results.

GraphQL just standardizes this process.

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