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0 pointshansonkd1y ago0 comments

> the back end team can select to serve REST APIs which only permit selecting, filtering, grouping and pagination that they know they can support within defined latency bounds for a given traffic level.

Why do you think that they can't do that with GraphQL? GraphQL isn't open ended. Its a highly restricted syntax for calling nested resources. If a resource is expensive simply don't nest it and make it a top level field and it is the same as REST?

Lots of nested resources are by default efficiently served by GraphQL because they are mostly returning single object foreign keys. Something that would take extra calls with REST.

GraphQL can have the same restrictions and performance guarantees as REST but the later is not necessarily true because in REST there is no standard way to define nested resource access.

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clintonb111y ago

I think the point here is, if you have to involve a backend team to add restrictions to the graphql endpoints and try to make good educated guesses where those might be, then the idea of frontend not needing backend engineers to query whatever they need becomes less of an advantage. So is the complexity of setting up graphql and then having your backend team try and make sure no frontend engineers can do terrible queries better for the software than custom rest APIs where needed and standard resource APIs everywhere else. Obviously it depends on the project. But I find the complexity of setting up and managing graphql often isn’t worth the pain, especially with schema first resource api designs and tooling like Google’s AIP linter.

hansonkdOP1y ago

> if you have to involve a backend team to add restrictions to the graphql endpoints and try to make good educated guesses where those might be, then the idea of frontend not needing backend engineers

No because if you dont do that you have to involve more engineers anyways to build the REST endpoints and keep modifying the rest endpoints.

GraphQL is also default restrictive (i.e. exposes nothing). You don't need to add engineers to make it restrictive.

In Startups typically:

  -> Frontend changes most frequently
  -> Backend "utility functions " changes less
  -> Data model changes the least

Without Graphql your "backend" ends up needing to have a lot of work and changes because it is constantly needing to be updated to the needs of the most frequent changes happening on the frontend.

With GraphQL the only time you need to update the backend is when those "utility" functions change (i.e. 3rd party api calls, etc) or the data model changes.

So you end up needing substantially less backend engineers.

BiteCode_dev1y ago

But you actually don't need to keep modifying the REST endpoints for most projects, that's what everybody is saying.

The vast majority of projects don't gain anything from this flexibility, because you don't have suddenly a 1000 of farmvilles copy cat that need their own little queries. You just have bob that need an order by.

smaudet1y ago

> With GraphQL the only time you need to update the backend is when those "utility" functions change (i.e. 3rd party api calls, etc) or the data model changes.

This is akin to saying that "directly exposing the database is easier, you only have to change things if the data changes".

And yes this is true, but when the data changes, or the environment changes, the paradigm falls apart a bit, no? Which is what the backend code was for, insulation from that.

> In Startups typically:

Yes, so for a short lived, non-scaled application its far easier to do it one way, and maybe that's fine for most small apps (that will never scale far). I suspect a lot of the push back comes from larger, less nimble, more backwards-compat focused organizations/apps.

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