Comment by trashymctrash

Comment by trashymctrash 2 days ago

What I liked about GraphQL was the fact that I only have to add a field in one place (where it belongs in the schema) and then any client can just query it. No more requests from Frontend developers like „Hey, can you also add that field to this endpoint? Then I don’t have to make multiple requests“. It just cuts that discussion short.

I also really liked that you can create a snapshot of the whole schema for integration test purposes, which makes it very easy to detect breaking changes in the API, e.g. if a nullable field becomes not-nullable.

But I also agree with lots of the points of the article. I guess I am just not super in love with REST. In my experience, REST APIs were often quite messy and inconsistent in comparison to GraphQL. But of course that’s only anecdotal evidence.

matsemann 2 days ago

But the first point is also its demise. I have object A, and want to know something from a related object E. Since I can ask for A-B-C-D-E myself, I just do it, even though the performance or spaghettiness takes a hit. Then ends up with frontend that's tightly coupled to the representation at the time as well, when "in the context of A I also need to know E" could've been a specialized type hiding those details.

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girvo 2 days ago

> Then ends up with frontend that's tightly coupled to the representation at the time as well, when "in the context of A I also need to know E" could've been a specialized type hiding those details.
GraphQL clients are built to do exactly that, Relay originally and Apollo in the last year, if I’m understanding what you’re saying: any component that touches E doesn’t have to care about how you got to it, fragment masking makes short work

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Culonavirus 2 days ago

> No more requests from Frontend developers like „Hey, can you also add that field to this endpoint? Then I don’t have to make multiple requests“.

Do people actually work like this is 2025? I mean sure, I guess when you're having entire teams just for frontends and backends then yea, but your average corporate web app development? It's all full stack these days. It's often expected that you can handle both worlds (client and server) and increasingly its even TypeScript "shared universe" when you don't even leave the TS ecosystem (React w/ something like RR plus TS BFF w/ SQL). This last point, where frontend and backend meet, is clearly the way things are going in general. I mean these days React doesn't even beat around the bush and literally tells you to install it with a framework, no more create-react-app, server side rendering is a staple now and server side components are going to be a core concept of React within a few years tops.

Javascript has conquered the client side of the internet, but not the server side. Typescript is going to unify the two.

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Aurornis 2 days ago

> It's all full stack these days. It's often expected that you can handle both worlds (client and server)
Full stack is common for simple web apps, where the backend is almost a thin layer over the database.
But a lot of the products I’ve worked with have had backends that are far more complex than something you could expect the front end devs to just jump into and modify.

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