Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Principled GraphQL

principledgraphql.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 88 posts

Re: Principled GraphQL

#61

Post by AlecAivazis »

pseudoramble wrote: post #6

One question I have is with the "One Graph" idea. I get the principle, and it does seem like it would be nice. However, it's hard for me to imagine what this looks like in practice. I haven't done anything with GraphQL in a few years. But when I did, we basically had several teams in a part of our organization (one of many in a huge giant megacorp) which built an API with GraphQL. We shared that code base and did the…

So the way we've currently been doing this at work is that we have a few different services that each maintain a portion of the One Graph that fits within their domain. The different APIs get merged together in a specialized service that understands the full picture.

The old way required a lot of manual work to pull in the different service schemas and do the stitching by hand. Luckily the team at Apollo and others are working on a new approach that automates a lot of the old work.

Shameless plug: I wrote a blog post that goes into some detail about what this can actually look like if you want to see more: https://medium.com/@aaivazis/a-guide-to-graphql-schema-feder...

Re: Principled GraphQL

#62

Post by AlecAivazis »

jeswin wrote: post #37

I think the single graph idea is impractical in any large organization. Every centralized model deteriorates over time due to many reasons: time pressure, carelessness and bigly varying competence levels in federated teams. A couple of years down the line everyone will hate it, and it'll be too big to discard. Independent team structures and microservices based architectures are acknowledging that such monoliths are…

The point of federating your schemas across different services is that you can achieve the single graph that represents the organization without having the separate parts step on teach other. It doesn't discard microservices, it embraces them.

Re: Principled GraphQL

#63

Post by _pmf_ »

PaulHoule wrote: post #15
andrewingram wrote: post #13

The main argument I have against "One Graph", is that it's not that uncommon to have two (or more) quite distinct views of the world. At my last job, we were building a social shopping app. Behind the scenes, products were versioned so that we could deal with disputes related to attempts to defraud customers. This (along with several other things) meant that the logical internal abstraction of the data model for thin…

The RDF world has conclusively proven that there is more than "One Graph". (e.g. people try to make "One Graph" and their projects die; try to make as many graphs as there are points of view and the sailing is smooth)

> The RDF world

I'll never forgive them for taking a great concept and absolutely beating it to death with intellectual (for lack of a better word) wankery. We could have ubiquitous Datomic style triple stores today if not for the Semantic Web researcher's need to generate pseudo-academic journal articles.

Re: Principled GraphQL

#64

Post by andrewingram »

wawhal wrote: post #59
unleashit wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called marketing and they're pretty good at it. They do provide some useful tools however if you want to use them and don't just blindly follow the docs (which are selling you on things you may/may not need).

Apollo's marketing game has been ridiculously on point. They are the only GraphQL client in the ecosystem that is fully compatible with any GraphQL compliant server [0]. And since it is pretty good, whenever one has to talk/market/propose anything about GraphQL in the community, they end up cross-marketing for Apollo. [0] Relay has its own spec and can be used only if the server supports it. Other GraphQL clients are…

FWIW: You don't have to follow any of the Relay spec to use Relay. Though you'll lose many of the benefits if you don't at least use globally unique 'id' fields on each major type. Connections are optional, the node interface is optional.

Re: Principled GraphQL

#65

Post by andrewingram »

strken wrote: post #46
topspin wrote: post #38

I'm experiencing some frustration with this. Click on this principledgraphql.com site and you find it's 'Apollo.' Nearly everywhere you look on the Internet regarding GraphQL you find 'Apollo' being injected. I'm using GraphQL in production systems. One is Node (graphql-js) and another is Java (graphql-java.) I read the GraphQL specification and adopted the reference implementation and it works great. Am I missing so…

Back in the Relay Classic days, the Apollo client library was a lot easier to use and a lot less heavyweight than Relay. My team ripped out Relay and replaced it with Apollo early in development because we felt Relay was too confusing. Relay Modern may be better; I haven't used it. They're also intending to make most of their money by promoting GraphQL as a tool, so low rates of adoption are an existential risk for t…

Ironically Relay Classic only needed a babel plugin, whilst Modern has a separate compiler you need to use. That said, the main issue with Relay is that it still has poor documentation, so it can't really compete with Apollo in that regard.

But I'm not going back to a world without data-masking at the component level, so Relay is the only choice for me right now (though I wish it wasn't).

Re: Principled GraphQL

#66

Post by andrewingram »

topspin wrote: post #38

I'm experiencing some frustration with this. Click on this principledgraphql.com site and you find it's 'Apollo.' Nearly everywhere you look on the Internet regarding GraphQL you find 'Apollo' being injected. I'm using GraphQL in production systems. One is Node (graphql-js) and another is Java (graphql-java.) I read the GraphQL specification and adopted the reference implementation and it works great. Am I missing so…

I'm trying to think back here, but I've been using GraphQL in production (at two different employers) for over 3 years, and I don't think there's any Apollo code in any of those systems.

Apollo Server is an improvement over baseline graphql-express, but for the most part it's nothing you can't easily add yourself. Having compatibility with Apollo Engine is useful if you end up wanting to use their monitoring tools. Pretty much everything else is just down to how much you want to buy into their ecosystem.

Re: Principled GraphQL

#67

Post by dmitriid »

topspin wrote: post #38

I'm experiencing some frustration with this. Click on this principledgraphql.com site and you find it's 'Apollo.' Nearly everywhere you look on the Internet regarding GraphQL you find 'Apollo' being injected. I'm using GraphQL in production systems. One is Node (graphql-js) and another is Java (graphql-java.) I read the GraphQL specification and adopted the reference implementation and it works great. Am I missing so…

1. It's marketing, as someone mentioned. If the first thing that comes up when you search for GraphQL is Apollo, it's good for business.

2. Marketing aside, they are one of the very few (if any) solutions that provide tools that fill the glaring gaps in GraphQL and make it easy(-ish): caching, auth etc.

Re: Principled GraphQL

#68

Post by vanwalj »

We should probably add another point which is "you probably don't need Apollo tools".

I'm using GraphQL in production since 2015 and I feel like the only Apollo contribution to the ecosystem was pushing lot of marketing content around their hacky tools and "best practices", leading teams to poorly designed backends.

Re: Principled GraphQL

#69

Post by Existenceblinks »

topspin wrote: post #38

I'm experiencing some frustration with this. Click on this principledgraphql.com site and you find it's 'Apollo.' Nearly everywhere you look on the Internet regarding GraphQL you find 'Apollo' being injected. I'm using GraphQL in production systems. One is Node (graphql-js) and another is Java (graphql-java.) I read the GraphQL specification and adopted the reference implementation and it works great. Am I missing so…

Thanks for telling it's everywhere. I immediately closed the tab when spotted the first "Apollo". Actually when I saw the title "Principled", I almost not-clicking it. Also these frontend stuff REALLY like "modern" word so much.

Re: Principled GraphQL

#70

Post by k__ »

andrewingram wrote: post #13

The main argument I have against "One Graph", is that it's not that uncommon to have two (or more) quite distinct views of the world. At my last job, we were building a social shopping app. Behind the scenes, products were versioned so that we could deal with disputes related to attempts to defraud customers. This (along with several other things) meant that the logical internal abstraction of the data model for thin…

I think they mean it technically only.

You have one root, but mutiple nodes after that, every one being essentially another graph.

Post reply on HN