GraphQL feels like magic when you first start with it (which should be a red flag) but once you need to support more roles or sets of permissions and as your business logic starts to creep in things go haywire. In my experience things that are easy up front are unmanageable once business logic gets added in. For straight CRUD it's amazing but very rarely do our apps stay as just CRUD and that's when things fall down. For example, on create of a new user I need to send a welcome email. It's been 5 years since I was working on that GraphQL project but I have no clue how we'd handle that. I'm sure there is some kind of a event system we could hook into but with REST I just have a simple endpoint that saves the data to the DB and then sends and email (or puts it in a queue), way easier than in GraphQL. Again, fetching and updating data is easy until you need to handle edge cases. I have the same feelings about Firebase and friends. Feels like magic at the start but falls down quick and/or becomes way too complicated. GraphQL feels like DRY run amuck, "I have to keep writing CRUD, let me abstract that away", ok but now if you need special logic for certain use-cases you have a mess on your hands. Maybe GraphQL has ways to solve it but I'll bet my hat that it's overly complicated and hard to follow, like most of GraphQL once you get past the surface.
I'd love to see a "Pet Store" (I think that's the common example I've seen demo'd in REST/Swagger/GraphQL/etc) example with heavy restrictions based on different users/roles. It's like using the "Todo app" example in a framework, sure that works and is straight forward, I want to see how you handle the hard stuff and if it's still easy.
With GraphQL you can just do the exact same thing? I do this all the time. I don't understand how you wouldn't be able to do that.
A while later, suppose someone adds some connection from user to, say, orders. The person who added orders to users was kinda lazy and assumed (somewhat correctly, at that moment anyway) that permissions weren't an issue. So there's no additional permission checking when fetching the orders connection.
Now, suppose 6 months pass. Some other engineer is now implementing reviews. Each review must have an author. What do ya know, there's already a user object available in Graphql. How convenient!
Now every user can inspect all orders of every other user, if that user has left a review.
Mistakes like this are all too easy with graphql, and is the number one reason I would never consider using graphql without a query whitelist.
In the equivalent REST API you would probably have to go far far out of your way to expose users order information in a reviews API, whereas in graphql that is the default.
In a typical REST application, it is enough to ask "does this user have permission to take this action".
In graphql, the question is rather different. It is "does this user have permission to access this data irrespective of the action they are taking", and you have to both ask that question and answer it correctly for everything in your graph.
Lmao that's just bad development, bad testing and the exact same thing can happen when using rest. "The dev wrote code and forgot to take permissions into account" happens to everyone.
And unlike rest, a properly written schema helps ensure they mostly do the right thing - even without strict permissions check, it should be obvious to anybody that they can't just write an `orders` resolver that does a `select * from orders`...
The cure is, like you say, writing a proper resolver. This form of permissions error most frequently happens when there is not a dedicated resolver (graphql-ruby, for example, makes it trivial to make a connection without a dedicated resolver).
I don't think this is as easy of a mistake to make with a typical REST application. In no normal universe would you return orders data in a reviews API, and the mistake would be much more obvious during development since you don't have to explicitly select the data you fetch from a rest API (so you are more likely to notice the extra information).
Whereas during development in graphql, the permissions error would be hidden because you probably would not select extra data for no reason.
