Meetup #111 - GraphQL

These days, your API most likely serves multiple clients - tablet and phone apps, rich web applications, perhaps even other applications that talk to it. These clients tend to have different needs - mobile clients will often show and need to fetch less data than the desktop client, or another application might want to access collections of resources rather than a single resource that would be displayed by a user facing mobile app. REST, which we discussed a few meetings ago, does not provide solutions for this problem. However, certain tools have cropped up that do: GraphQL and Falcor. This week we are going to focus on GraphQL.

Article to read: The Web After Tommorow

Secondary article to read: The official GraphQL blog (all 5 articles)

Meeting Lifeguard: Grzegorz Bańczak

We typically select only one resource to read for a meetup, so this might seem a little excessive, but in our defence there is no academic paper introducing GraphQL. The Web After Tomorrow article is a great opinion piece that should help us ground our discussion in terms of why GraphQL is important, and where does it fit in the array of technologies that will likely be found in the future APIs/backends. However, as inspiring as the article is, the discussion would be pretty shallow if we all didn't have even a basic practical idea about how to work with GraphQL and how it looks like, which is where the blog comes in.

Feel free to share interesting resources you find about GraphQL in the comments section!