React, Relay and GraphQL: Under the Hood of the Times Website Redesign

Post by andrewingram » Sat, Jul 01, 2017, 7:11 PM UTC

thomasfoster96 wrote: post #10

colemorrison wrote: post #2

I've looked at GraphQL a number of times. Does anyone have any practical examples of integrating it with backend(s), APIs, and/or specific databases? So instead of "we use GraphQL, much love" + basic example and how it looks on React - a "here's how we take that structure and resolve it and return it." Because that structure looks amazingly sweet - but if in the background it's requiring circles of work, work and rew…

I strongly suggest that you look at Apollo's GraphQL offerings. My 'aha' moment with GraphQL came while reading the docs for their GraphQL server[0]. IMHO Relay doesn't make a lot of sense. Apollo Client [1] has a much better feature set for most use cases, doesn't need React and is better documented. [0] http://dev.apollodata.com/tools/graphql-tools/resolvers.html [1] http://dev.apollodata.com/core/

Post by ruslan_talpa » Sat, Jul 01, 2017, 7:34 PM UTC

andrewingram wrote: post #50

colemorrison wrote: post #2

I've looked at GraphQL a number of times. Does anyone have any practical examples of integrating it with backend(s), APIs, and/or specific databases? So instead of "we use GraphQL, much love" + basic example and how it looks on React - a "here's how we take that structure and resolve it and return it." Because that structure looks amazingly sweet - but if in the background it's requiring circles of work, work and rew…

Here's a high-level article about performance in general, but it shows how a UI and query could map to (for example) a function-driven API (this could be local to the server or remote): https://dev-blog.apollodata.com/optimizing-your-graphql-requ... Examples more specific to a particular backend technology feel redundant because my assumption is that once you're in the land of calling functions, we don't need to hold…

Post by baguette » Sat, Jul 01, 2017, 7:48 PM UTC

notadoc wrote: post #36

Putting aside all of the technical fun, from a pure reader perspective of any website sometimes I miss just simple boring HTML with a bit of CSS to make it more pleasant and readable. I don't know about anyone else, but particularly from a consumption standpoint I miss the days of 100k webpages. I'm always stunned, but at the same time never surprised, when you discover a single webpage is 35+ MB, consuming 2GB of RA…

Post by ruslan_talpa » Sat, Jul 01, 2017, 8:05 PM UTC

andrewingram wrote: post #54

ruslan_talpa wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would i "optimise" for the thing that might never happen (join not an option) while taking the hit right now? i've tested this (3 level query) and the throughput is 10 times slower with dataloader, as in i need 10 servers instead of one to do the same job.

I mean to structure your server in such a way where you're not trying to automatically convert your entire query AST into a single massively complicated SQL query. It's true that in simple cases, one complex query can be the fastest way to get the data you need, but you leave this territory pretty quickly. It's perfectly valid to identify subtrees of your query that would benefit from being executed as a database que…

Post by i_s » Sat, Jul 01, 2017, 8:18 PM UTC

ruslan_talpa wrote: post #5

colemorrison wrote: post #2

I've looked at GraphQL a number of times. Does anyone have any practical examples of integrating it with backend(s), APIs, and/or specific databases? So instead of "we use GraphQL, much love" + basic example and how it looks on React - a "here's how we take that structure and resolve it and return it." Because that structure looks amazingly sweet - but if in the background it's requiring circles of work, work and rew…

You've hit a (pain) point. While graphql reduces the amount of trips to the backend for the browser, those round trips get pushed down to a lower level, between backend and db. The reference graphql-js implementation, while at first looks so easy, you just write a resolver for a field, makes it oh so easy to have terrible n+1 problems. dataloader helps a bit but it's not as optimal as it can be. You need to be very c…

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