Simi

May 04, 2022

GraphQL

Introduction

GraphQL is a query language (that’s what the “QL” stands for) for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data. Basically, it is used to load data from a server to a client -- it’s a way to get data from an API into your application. And as you’ll see, it does this in a much more efficient manner than traditional methods and services.

History

GraphQL was developed by Facebook in 2012 because the team needed “a data-fetching API powerful enough to describe all of Facebook, yet simple enough to be easy to learn and use by our product developers” when building the mobile applications. Since then, the querying language has steadily grown in popularity -- in part to Facebook open-sourcing the language in 2016. ⁠ ⁠GraphQL is much different than a standard REST API where you typically have a specific endpoint or resource you’re hitting that determines an entire block of data that comes back in the returning JSON response, which then needs to be parsed and scattered. ⁠ ⁠While GraphQL may just seem like fancy new technology created by Facebook, many are finding that the implementation is actually quite practical.

Conclusion

GraphQL has proven itself as a solution to aggregate data from multiple sources, specify data, and describe data.