How and why GraphQL will influence the Sourcehut alpha

GraphQL as a query language is simply better than REST in most cases imo. REST has too much client side state, which not only has the potential to make things harder for clients to consume, but also has all the inconsistent states to handle where your consumer gets part way through a multiple-REST method workflow, and then bails. REST also absolutely sucks for mutating arrays.

Really I just look at GraphQL as a nice RPC framework. The graph theory operations like field level resolvers are mostly useless. But if you treat each relationship as a node rather than each field, you can get it to work very nicely with a normalized data set. I haven’t found it hard to preserve join efficiency in the backend either, and it so far hasn’t forced me into redundant query operations.

Just as long as you don’t use appsync. Really, don’t even bother.

> GraphQL as a query language is simply better than REST in most cases imo. REST has too much client side state, which not only has the potential to make things harder for clients to consume, but also has all the inconsistent states to handle where your consumer gets part way through a multiple-REST method workflow, and then bails.

How much client state you maintain seems to me to be orthogonal to GraphQL/REST.

Take your example or a multiple-REST workflow. I presume your point was that the workflow could be implemented by a single GraphQL query/mutation/whatever - but just the same, you can put as much code and logic as you like behind a REST call?

You could do that, but if you start creating endpoints for transactions rather than method -> resource endpoints, then you’re not really making a REST interface anymore. But even ignoring REST purity, I’d argue that GraphQL is better suited to that design pattern in general.

When most people refer to REST APIs, they really mean "HTTP APIs". I really don't think we should reach for GraphQL just because of the ideological notion of daring to not adhere 100% to REST.

If you’re going to abandon REST design principles, then you’ll eventually end up with something that pretty much does what GraphQL does. At that stage why not just adopt a more fit-for-purpose set of design principles?

Keep in mind that I’m only really advocating for it as a query language for HTTP APIs (which as a side benefit has some nice existing tooling which you may or may not find useful).