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After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL

bessey.dev

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Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL

#491
post #25

Kudos to the author for reevaluating his opinion and changing heart on a technology he admits to have championed before. IMO GraphQL is a technological dead end in much the same way as Mongo is. They were both conceived to solve a perceived problem with tools widely adopted at the time, but ended up with something which is even worse, while the tools they were trying to replace rapidly matured and improved. Today Ope…

No idea why you bundle Mongo in there. I use Mongo in multiple production apps and I've never, ever looked back. Wouldn't even consider RDBMS's at all after my experience with Mongo unless I absolutely had to.

What kind of "production apps"? A todo list saas?

I swear, the older I am, the more convinced I am that people who don't use a RDBMS just don't work on complex systems. Period.

Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL

#492

I bought into the hype and I feel bad for the company where I implemented it. One true endpoint to rule them all and cause endless headaches in the process. With most tech that I screw up I assume that "I wasn't using it right" but with GraphQL I'm not sure how anyone could. The permissions/auth aspect alone is a nightmare. Couple that with potential performance issues (N+1 or just massive amounts of data) and I want…

I had an eerily similar experience with GraphQL where by the end of "productionizing" the backend to support the client load, were using whatever their equivalent of cached/persisted queries is called (sorry I can't recall their terms for this). We had ultimately come full circle to something that was harder to use than a REST API but also more complicated at every layer.

Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL

#493
post #487

I bought into the hype and I feel bad for the company where I implemented it. One true endpoint to rule them all and cause endless headaches in the process. With most tech that I screw up I assume that "I wasn't using it right" but with GraphQL I'm not sure how anyone could. The permissions/auth aspect alone is a nightmare. Couple that with potential performance issues (N+1 or just massive amounts of data) and I want…

Can you give an example for the permission issues that you had with GQL and would've been easier in REST? Genuinely curious, as I'm implementing a GQL backend with simple permission handling and haven't run into anything yet, but I wanna know what could await me

With REST I can fairly easily filter out any data based on roles/permissions either at query time or before turning it into JSON. With GraphQL I need that info deep in the resolver logic and for nested data I don't want to fetch the name of a person if they calling user doesn't even have access to see that user (and I don't want to fetch the user and their name only to delete it from the response later). GraphQL, being so open-ended to what you are fetching, means I have to make sure to plug a ton of holes whereas REST I have a specific query, there is no way to fetch nested data (unless I specifically allow it via GET/POST params). I can easily say "If role X -> use this query, if role Y -> use this query, etc", I found that very difficult to do in GraphQL.

GraphQL feels like magic when you first start with it (which should be a red flag) but once you need to support more roles or sets of permissions and as your business logic starts to creep in things go haywire. In my experience things that are easy up front are unmanageable once business logic gets added in. For straight CRUD it's amazing but very rarely do our apps stay as just CRUD and that's when things fall down. For example, on create of a new user I need to send a welcome email. It's been 5 years since I was working on that GraphQL project but I have no clue how we'd handle that. I'm sure there is some kind of a event system we could hook into but with REST I just have a simple endpoint that saves the data to the DB and then sends and email (or puts it in a queue), way easier than in GraphQL. Again, fetching and updating data is easy until you need to handle edge cases. I have the same feelings about Firebase and friends. Feels like magic at the start but falls down quick and/or becomes way too complicated. GraphQL feels like DRY run amuck, "I have to keep writing CRUD, let me abstract that away", ok but now if you need special logic for certain use-cases you have a mess on your hands. Maybe GraphQL has ways to solve it but I'll bet my hat that it's overly complicated and hard to follow, like most of GraphQL once you get past the surface.

I'd love to see a "Pet Store" (I think that's the common example I've seen demo'd in REST/Swagger/GraphQL/etc) example with heavy restrictions based on different users/roles. It's like using the "Todo app" example in a framework, sure that works and is straight forward, I want to see how you handle the hard stuff and if it's still easy.

Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL

#494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With internal REST for companies I have seen so many single page specific endpoints. Gross. Hardly gross. It is what it is and it’s universal across the domain. I bet Windows has internal APIs or even external ones that were created just for one page/widget/dialog of one app. It’s the nature of things at times.

Its gross because it is a waste. An engineer had to spend time to make that specific API for that page instead of the frontend consumer using what was already defined and get all the resources with one call and 0 backend engineer needed for that new page.

Every page is special. Using generalized API is waste of resources. Generalized APIs are hard to use and develop. It takes a genius to create a good generalized API (say SQL) and even those generalized APIs are not usable in web context (because of authorization and DDoS issues).

It's better to think about optimizing of creation specialized APIs.

Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL

#495
post #478

I bought into the hype and I feel bad for the company where I implemented it. One true endpoint to rule them all and cause endless headaches in the process. With most tech that I screw up I assume that "I wasn't using it right" but with GraphQL I'm not sure how anyone could. The permissions/auth aspect alone is a nightmare. Couple that with potential performance issues (N+1 or just massive amounts of data) and I want…

I’ve only been a consumer of a GraphQL API, so I don’t know what it’s like to maintain, but I mostly enjoyed using it. Of course the documentation on some kinds of query syntax was too sparse, (this is for Shopify) but I could see how it might be nice for certain kinds of cases. If you run a platform it might be a good option to offer in your API. For shopify afaik there are equivalent calls in both REST and graphql…

Can you elaborate on lack of syntax docs? As far as I understand one of the big big huugge benefits of GraphQL is that you get the strongly typed schema via the introspection query, so you can build queries with some confidence, that as long as the schema (version) is the same it should be syntactically okay. What did Spotify do compared to this?

Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL

#496
post #435

I bought into the hype and I feel bad for the company where I implemented it. One true endpoint to rule them all and cause endless headaches in the process. With most tech that I screw up I assume that "I wasn't using it right" but with GraphQL I'm not sure how anyone could. The permissions/auth aspect alone is a nightmare. Couple that with potential performance issues (N+1 or just massive amounts of data) and I want…

Someone like you made me quit my first job as developer. He implemented a Clojure + GraphQL nightmare.

Well that wasn't me, I implemented an Akka + GraphQL nightmare instead :)

Joking aside, I'm sorry that happened to you and I'm sorry for the people that took over the system I helped to write.

Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL

#497
post #449

Aside from all the valid points listed in the blog I found out that the frontend engineers in my company save some queries in central library and reuse them even if they don't need all the field returned by this array just to save themselves the time they spend writing queries so they are basically using GraphQL as REST at the end and now we have the worst of both worlds.

This isn't actually that terrible since these fields are cached by a client-side library like Apollo. If the query has already been made elsewhere then it won't be doing any extra work The only downside is if one of those unused fields changes due to a mutation then all components using that field will rerender (ofc I'm assuming React here). Again, not the biggest concern if you've got your memoization set up correct…

You missed the actual downside of this only works if there is no mutations in the background from other clients/processes making your cache stale.

Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL

#498
Your most precious resource is time. I'm really glad of the time I invested in Python, node, TypeScript, Virtualisation and Serverless.

I'm less happy about the time I wasted on bash, DOOM WADs, and Desktop Linux. Yes these are are all a while ago. I didn't invest my time wisely when I was young.

I'm also glad I didn't invest in GraphQL, Kubernetes, Angular, Solaris, and perl.

Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL

#499
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

REST APIS suck for nested resources. GraphQL is a huge breakthrough in managing them. Ever seen an engineer do a loop and make n+1 REST calls for resources? It happens more often then you think because they don't want to have to create a backend ticket to add related resources to a call. With internal REST for companies I have seen so many single page specific endpoints. Gross. > There have been different opinions ab…

Unpopular opinion: I'm actually a fan of singe page specific endpoints. You get much easier debugging, easier to audit security, easier performance optimization an the imho pretty small price to pay is that it's "not elegant" and a bit of backend code

Sounds good in theory. In practice, what I've seen is people don't just do single page endpoints with shared services, they follow this all the way down into the services and so you end up with lots of duplicate looking code. This isn't a problem until the application gets big enough and now you have business logic that should be the same spread out across an app. This leads to weird bugs where something that should work the same way doesn't depending on which page you're accessing things from. Of course, I don't a solution, solving things like this is what makes software engineering hard.

Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL

#500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people have a limited appetite for complexity. I wrote some front-end stuff back in the days but I've lost track of whatever is happening these days. jQuery to append some stuff took five minutes to learn, but learning react hooks takes a determined effort. Likewise, adding a field to a graphql type is simple, but doing it with authorization, controlling n+1s, adding tests etc.. requires front-end folks to ac…

This is why the Rails community should be applauded in my book, for their dogged determination that we should keep it a “one person” framework. Yes it may not be as performant, type safe or flashy on the front end but my god it’s productive. At my startup there are 7 devs who can all do tickets across the stack and as we grow I think it would be good if we could resist the pressure to silo and specialize

> but my god it’s productive.

It really is. Regrettably, I've drifted away from it in large part because of client requirements for more "modern" and "maintainable" solutions (e.g. Python or Node; I'll take Python every time, thanks). Django comes very close in terms of productivity (and is better in some ways: auth, admin, etc.) but the Rails CLI, generators and community (not sure if this is still relevant) give it the edge.

The "recent" (last 10+ years) movement towards "lightweight" libraries (instead of frameworks) that require you to either reinvent the wheel, copy-and-paste or use some random "getting-started" template every time you start a new project is disheartening. As others have said above, I think it's partially resume-driven-development and people wanting to tinker (both of which I do appreciate).

Something which continues to surprise me is that there hasn't really been a "modern" successor to Rails. Granted, I haven't kept pace with developments in the Node/TypeScript world but, last time I looked, Sails was on the right track but wasn't very actively developed and I was shot down (in favor of Express spaghetti) when I suggested it. There's also a smattering of Rust web frameworks but none that quite fit the bill and come with all of the batteries and opinions included. I keep saying I'm going to do a Summer of Code project which attempts this but ... life.

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