Everything You Wanted to Know About GraphQL (But Were Afraid to Ask) – DataDrivenInvestor

API’s are Everywhere now. So, modern developers need an efficient Query Language, GraphQL

If you are bored “Try a food you don’t like” is one of the result when you send Bored API a request. Try yourself On Browser URL or request on the website. The world of API’s are unlimited and undeniably the power in modern platforms.

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If you are not familiar about API (Application Program Interface), It is a way 2 application programs interact with each other. For example, If You Click “Upload Your Photo” button on Facebook, API will let you upload your picture to Facebook. There are hundreds of thousands of API’s available for programmers to use on their public or private applications. Spend few minutes to read and spend few minutes to have an overview A simple Overview Summary

Let’s begin with How should you see GraphQL? Is it for the next-generation of API design? Or are you wondering how the heck it works, and why some developers would choose it over REST? If any of these questions have piqued your interest, read on! We’ll cover everything from GraphQL’s best practices to fun facts about APIs. Let’s get started!

GraphQL is an open-source data query language created by Facebook engineers that has become all the rage in web development in just a few years’ time. It’s already being used by GitHub, Shopify, Twitter, Pinterest and Yelp and more. But what does it do? And why is it so popular?
Once you get started with GraphQL, you might be surprised at how easy it is to make your own queries — but don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security! As easy as making queries can be, there are still best practices for using them.

GraphQL is a query language for APIs, allowing users to retrieve only what they need from APIs, and nothing more. It’s not about creating a tight 1:1 mapping between your data model and your API responses, but about getting exactly what you need from an API in response. For example, in GraphQL, you might ask for all of your users, with no extra data attached like how many followers they have or how many tweets they’ve posted.

As the official webpage mentions “GraphQL is designed to make APIs fast, flexible, and developer-friendly. It can even be deployed within an integrated development environment (IDE) known as GraphiQL. As an alternative to REST, GraphQL lets developers construct requests that pull data from multiple data sources in a single API call.”

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1. Serve many resources in a single request
   How many times have you wished that you could send a single request, and get multiple resources back? With GraphQL, you can! When learning how to use GraphQL effectively, consider that in one query call, you can include references to other parts of your API: similar types of data, related data points or static resources. This means that in one single request from GraphQL, you can ask for many resources. The developer wins because they need only one endpoint for each type of resource required.
2. Version-less API
   When building an API with GraphQL, one of its biggest benefits is that it evolves alongside your API. Your API can grow and change, but instead of having to support old versions of your API or create multiple APIs for different scenarios, you can just update your client’s schema with a new version number. This means you don’t have to worry about breaking backwards compatibility — you get new features for free!
3. Leveraging with a type system
   GraphQL’s type and fields system provides structural metadata about your data, which makes it possible for clients to choose exactly what they need from a single API. It is about unlimited possibilities built from a single endpoint. This approach avoids efforts due to manual parsing code.
4. GraphiQL is the Interactive developer tool
   The Interactive part of GraphiQL comes from being able to type into it and explore a running system. The API Explorer enables you to navigate a schema and its contents by introspecting a running API.
5. Provide your own code and data
   One of the major benefits of using GraphQL is that you don’t have to ask for everything. By design, it gives clients what they need and only what they need. This allows clients to bring their own data, rather than always having to request it from a server (and worry about rate limits).

The core difference between GraphQL and REST APIs is that GraphQL is a specification, a query language, while REST is an architectural concept for networked systems. So, If you’re not working in an environment that uses a lot of APIs, you might be wondering what GraphQL is and why it should matter to you. The concept is actually quite simple: GraphQL is a query language that allows us to fetch data from our APIs. Instead of sending complex requests with multiple queries, we can ask for exactly what we need in one request.

Disadvantages Of Using GraphQL: When not to use?

1. While GraphQL comes with many benefits, it also presents a few disadvantages. Because GraphQL isn’t as simple as sending a request and receiving data back, implementing GraphQL can require significant time and resources to set up and maintain.
2. Developers are just getting familiar with a technology that’s been out for less than two years, so it’s not surprising that there are many anti-patterns in how people use GraphQL. Thankfully, if you want to use GraphQL correctly, you don’t have to look far. The full list of anti-patterns isn’t yet established, but we community know many of them are at least.
3. Adhere to the best practices:

1. GraphQL has some unique constraints and best practices that are new to developers. Due to its origins, GraphQL is a very strict protocol that only allows valid queries, mutations, and fields when they’re called in specific ways.
2. Refer GraphQL developer’s guide which describes some of these design guidelines and patterns as examples of what not to do. GraphQL was created as a tool for front-end developers who often had no control over how APIs were built but could use GraphQL alone on their websites. As such, they used it with standard REST APIs without considering how these might be modified by servers or backends.

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1. Facebook has over 800 million user accounts and handles more than 850 billion objects daily. Yet, their latest version of Facebook had an average page load time of <1 second.
2. Twitter has a history of 50 thousand tweets per second but it only takes 8 seconds for new users to sign up and start tweeting.
3. More than 70 billion emails are sent every day through Gmail and Inbox by Google.
4. More than 9 million queries per second are served by IBM’s Watson.
5. More than 5 million documents are processed in under a minute every day by Netflix APIs.

The list goes on. Yet, it is important to realize that while you can reach large volumes of people using these APIs, not all requests will be answered successfully in an instant. In order for businesses and applications to work effectively, they have to have an understanding of performance and their limitations as well as their unique operating conditions.

Thanks to its expressive and flexible nature, GraphQL is an excellent choice for developing APIs. There are also many other benefits of GraphQL that make it a great technology choice for a number of use cases and projects. We can see why Facebook has developed such an important piece of their infrastructure with GraphQL and we hope that you have found these fun facts about API informative and useful! With any luck, now you know everything there is to know about GraphQL and you should be ready for anything!

a. GraphQL Ecosystem (CNCF Like Open Source map)

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