After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
bessey.dev
After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
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Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
#2GraphQL is the peanut butter to Reacts chocolate at FB.
It works there because
1. Every user is logged in. Is there anything you can do at FB without giving up something to the Zuck?
2. Because it's all behind a login, you can front load the first login/request with a giant SPA and then run all the custom queries you want.
3. everything at FB is some sort of blended context (my user, someone else's user, a permissions interaction)... security is baked in to every field.
4. Because of permissions, and login requirement it's hard to be a bad actor (FB just locks you out, nothing is public).
If you have a SPA and logged in user requirement and that robust permissions model then GraphQL might make sense... Otherwise its a shining example of conways law and might not be fit for your org... The same can be said for react too.
Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
#3GraphQL was the shiny new thing that everyone was excited about and I was also trying to learn and use it too, but I've never found a compelling use-case to use it over REST API. Now that you shared your experiences with it, it give me more reason to stay away from it. Plus, I think it's more productive to stay with the stack I'm very fluent at.
Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
#4I never got into GraphQL. It always felt like a lot of complexity for little gain (I'm full-stack). People always jump on tools created by tech giants but they solve different problems than the vast majority of companies.
Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
#5GraphQL basically only really works with monoliths that share the same access-pattern (either everyone logged in, or everyone logged out), it's otherwise a pain to merge multiple different graphql-schemas into a single one (or at least I'm not aware of an elegant way to achieve that).. The worst of two worlds is a micro-services back-end with a graphql Api interface, it makes testing individual services and the Api as a whole quite annoying.
I do really like the Api definition part of it though - but I found something like typespec now to be the perfect middle-ground, it allows out you describe your apis similar to a graphql Api without enforcing the graphql engine on you though.
Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
#6I agree with the article, and want to add on that the browser network debugging tools are a pain to use with GraphQL (every request to /api/graphql, can't even quickly filter by endpoint name). I landed instead on OpenAPI, which can feel like a bit of a hoop to jump through sometimes when writing endpoints (but then, so can GraphQL), but the result is equally nice. And it's much easier to get authorization right with REST APIs.
I wonder if GraphQL would have been as popular if it was a much smaller shop than facebook launching it. Feels like having a name like FB gets you a tech credibility pass.
Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
#7GraphQL is the peanut butter to Reacts chocolate at FB. It works there because 1. Every user is logged in. Is there anything you can do at FB without giving up something to the Zuck? 2. Because it's all behind a login, you can front load the first login/request with a giant SPA and then run all the custom queries you want. 3. everything at FB is some sort of blended context (my user, someone else's user, a permission…
presumably there is still some authorization requirements though? The logged in user is authorized to see details about Friend 123, but not about Non-Friend 456?
Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
#8I never got into GraphQL. It always felt like a lot of complexity for little gain (I'm full-stack). People always jump on tools created by tech giants but they solve different problems than the vast majority of companies.
agree, it solve problem at FB for sure, that is a good point.
Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
#9Haven't used GraphQL but the idea of exposing queries from the client directly to the DB is totally bananas, even behind a login with a separate auth. Even just explaining your DB structure is a thing you should not do.
Re: After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
#10I never got into GraphQL. It always felt like a lot of complexity for little gain (I'm full-stack). People always jump on tools created by tech giants but they solve different problems than the vast majority of companies.
agree, it solve problem at FB for sure, that is a good point.
Same with Redux. Solved problem in FB. Increases complexity tremendously for 90% of other websites. I remember seeing the tutorial being showed in Todo app and thinking "wtf is this garbage needed for here".
I'm glad Redux hype train is over and nobody is using it on new projects no more.