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0 pointssmaudet1y ago0 comments

> What if your engineers change $client/$server and the new version makes really expensive queries?

Yes, so the cost benefit here is not in favor of GraphQL. If both technologies ultimately suffer from the same issues (what to do about unpredictable clients), but one is far more complex to implement and use (GraphQL), then there's a clear winner. Spoiler, its not GraphQL.

Page specific endpoints, I would argue, can do 99% of what GraphQL was trying to do. If you want to use it as some sort of template language for constructing page specific endpoints, that could be useful (the same way xml schema is useful for specifying complex xml documents).

But you can optimize a page specific endpoint, and do it with REST-style endpoint to boot.

Having a bunch of "simple" calls and optimizing for the "complex" ones that you need using metrics/analysis is what you should be doing, not creating a complex API that is far harder to break down into "simple" cases.

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andrewingram1y ago

When you build a GraphQL server, you’re creating a system that outputs page-specific endpoints. They can be generated just-in-time (the default) or at build time (the general recommendation).

The engineering work involved shifts from building individual endpoints to building the endpoint factory. This shift may or may not be worth the trade off, but there are definite advantages, especially from the perspective of whomever is building the client. And once you factor in the ease at which you can introduce partial streaming with defer and streamable (granted they’re still WIP spec-wise), the experience can be pretty sublime.

smaudetOP1y ago

https://graphql.org/blog/2020-12-08-defer-stream/

This? Yeah, that seems neat, for command/batch queuing.

I'd be curious how it compares to e.g. rest apis returning refs to e.g. webrtc streams or tcp/udp ones for non-browser. I presume the main advantage would be client side.

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