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0 pointsDanielHB2y ago0 comments

GraphQL is very good for places where frontend and backend developers are isolated from each other (separate teams). Or rather places where you have data-producers and data-consumers as separate teams. If you have a big enough org eventually there will be many of such teams, interdisciplinary teams are not feasible at scale for everything.

It allows teams to work with less communication overhead. It solves more of a human problems than a technical problems, if someone think there is no value in that and bare metal performance is paramount that person never worked in a big org.

> RPC and REST are just more straightforward to monitor, log, cache, authorize and debug.

In some ways yes, in others no. For example it can be near impossible to see if a deprecated field in a REST API is still being used and by which clients it is being used. With GraphQL this is fairly simple.

Unfortunately GraphQL way of working is very different from normal REST APIs and often requires more complex server-side caching. The N+1 problem needs to be figured out upfront for every data-storage system used in the backend.

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4 comments · 4 top-level

BiteCode_dev2y ago

The problem is you delegate a lot of the query building to the client, hoping that it will not suddenly change your performance profile by being creative and that you will have not missed an obviously expensive use case coming.

That's a huge bet, especially given that GraphQL is expensive in the first place, and given that the more you grow the API in size, the less you can actually map the cartesian product of all request params.

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dudeinjapan2y ago

Couldn't disagree more. GraphQL encourages tight-coupling--the Frontend is allowed to send any possible query to the Backend, and the Backend needs to accommodate all possible permutations indefinitely and with good performance. This leads to far more fingerpointing/inefficiency in the log run, despite whatever illusion of short-term expediency it creates.

It is far better for the Backend to provide Frontend a contract--can do it with OpenAPI/Swagger--here are the endpoints, here are the allowed parameters, here is the response you will get--and we will make sure this narrowly defined scope works 100% of the time!

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tuan2y ago

> GraphQL is very good for places where frontend and backend developers are isolated from each other (separate teams)

What do you mean by "backend developer" ? The one who creates the GraphQL endpoints for UI to consume ?

afiori2y ago

> In some ways yes, in others no. For example it can be near impossible to see if a deprecated field in a REST API is still being used and by which clients it is being used. With GraphQL this is fairly simple.

You should log deprecation warnings.

But also if the client is composing urls/params manually then you are not doing REST, you are doing RPC.

Rest APIs should mainly use HATEOAS hyperlinks to obtain a resource. that is clients almost always call links you have provided in other reponses (starting from a main entrypoint)

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