Loren describes the differences between gRPC and GraphQL and summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of each. They give a rule of thumb (GraphQL for client-server and gRPC for server-to-server) and note cases in which you might want to make exceptions to the rule.

This package wraps the graphql-go/graphql implementation to provide a “fluent” pattern for constructing GraphQL queries in Go. This can be valuable in situations where dynamic queries are desired: when the fields of a GraphQL query (or mutation) are not known until runtime. For most other use cases, plain query strings or a helper library such as this should be sufficient.

I wonder if this would change Mislav’s unpopular GraphQL/Go opinion…

Vikram Rangnekar:

GraphJin gives you an instant secure and fast GraphQL API without code. GraphQL is automagically compiled into an efficient SQL query. Use either as a library or a standalone service. Build your backend APIs 100X faster.

I have to zonk him for that “automagically”, but still looks like a cool project.

Mark Sandstrom and Ben Kraft join Jon and Mat to talk about GraphQL. What exactly is it this query language everyone has been talking about? How does it work? What Go libraries are out there, and where should you get started?

The Supabase folks have open sourced a work-in-progress native PostgreSQL extension adding GraphQL support. First, they surveyed the field and liked what they saw from Graphile and Hasura, but…

we host free-tier projects on VMs with 1 GB of memory. After tallying the resources reserved for PostgreSQL, PostgREST, Kong, GoTrue, and a handful of smaller services, we were left with a total memory budget of … 0 MB 😬. Unsurprisingly, our pathological memory target disqualified any option that required launching another process in those VMs.

By their estimates, this effort will reduces the platform’s memory requirements by 525 TB/hours every month. Seems worth it!

Doug Martin joins Nick to talk to us about building GraphQL backends in TypeScript with NestJS and his project, nestjs-query. We talk about what NestJS is and its built-in support for GraphQL and REST, and then dive into how NestJS-query extends it to generate code for you.

From Shruti Kapoor on PayPal’s technology blog:

We started our GraphQL adoption journey by building our checkout experience. We saw tremendous benefits in adopting GraphQL when our checkout app built with GraphQL became our guiding light.We built more apps, provided infrastructure support, launched a public GraphQL API, and provided trainings and learning materials across the company. We also set up a standards body, provided a GraphQL tools fanny pack, and built sample apps to help teams get started.

Today, GraphQL is being used by several production apps across PayPal. It is now a default pattern to use GraphQL for building new UI apps. Many existing apps are in the process of migrating to GraphQL.

Most people who use GraphQL haven’t read the spec, often because it sounds or looks intimidating. This post simply and cogently shares the essentials of the query language section of the spec.

KBall, Amal, and Feross are joined by special guest Jenn Creighton to talk about all things Apollo. How does Apollo fit into the GraphQL ecosystem, what’s the next big thing, and when would you choose to use it?

John Resig and Loren Sands-Ramshaw first announced the beta of their GraphQL book (discussed here) nearly three years ago. After years of writing and re-writing, it’s now ready to be released. Loren had this to say in the linked announcement post:

This project has taken much longer than we expected, and the length of the book has wound up being much longer than we expected. We’d like to give a huge shout-out to our 740 beta readers who stuck with us through four major versions of the in-progress text.

The GraphQL Guide aims to be the most comprehensive guide to GraphQL, from a beginner introduction to advanced client and server topics.

You’ve probably heard of GraphiQL since it’s what lives on graphql.org, but there are other GraphQL IDEs out there. This post by Vishwa Mehta on the Hasura team is a decent rundown of the scene.

KBall, Jerod, and Nick Nisi dive into GraphQL – what it can do, what the challenges are, and how it differs from REST – all with a generous helping of metaphor about buffets, restaurants, and of course bacon.

One of Gatsby’s greatest virtues is how it normalizes all data sources through its source plugin architecture. This is cool because it gives you a unified access layer for everything from the file system to 3rd-party APIs to headless CMSes.

Kevin Titor must’ve liked the idea enough that he’s bringing it to other frameworks that support static site generation (Next.js, Nuxt.js, Eleventy, etc.). The main thing missing from Mordred is a community creating plugins for popular CMSes and services; a great way to get involved!

So you just access the GraphQL data in your application like so:

const App = () => (
  <div>
    {query.me.name}
    {query.users({ limit: 10 }).map(user => (
      <div key={user.id}>{user.name}</div>
    ))}
  </div>
)

And behind the scenes gqless generates the queries for you like so:

query App {
  me { name }
  users(limit: 10) {
    id
    name
  }
}

Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub, board member at Netlify) joins the party and brings his new, opinionated, full-stack, serverless web app framework with him. Will Redwood help usher in the future Tom predicted back in 2018? We discuss that and a whole lot more on this must-listen episode.

Want great developer experience and easy scaling? Redwood is here! Built on React, GraphQL, and Prisma, Redwood works with the components and development workflow you love, but with simple conventions and helpers to make your experience even better.

We’re having Tom Preston-Werner on JS Party tomorrow for a deep-dive on Redwood.

We teamed up with some friends of ours at Heroku to promote the Code-ish podcast so we’re sharing a full-length episode right here in the JS Party feed. This episode features Owen Ou, who is joined by Tanmai Gopal (CEO of Hasura) talking about the pros and cons of using GraphQL in your application. Learn more and subscribe at heroku.com/podcasts/codeish.

Go Time panelist Mat Ryer joins Jerod to talk through the pros and cons of GraphQL vs REST for a future Changelog API. There’s also a fair bit of language chat around Go and JavaScript, a section on Machine Learning, and some inside baseball on where Go Time is heading.

Having to open an additional app to play a game is sometimes too tiring. Therefore, I thought it’d be interesting to somehow implement Minecraft with javascript, essentially bringing the whole Minecraft game into the web. This not only takes away the tedious process of installing the game, it also brings the entire game to players within a couple clicks.

Words cannot describe how much I adore the thought that building this extremely ambitious piece of software was a better alternative to the tedious process of installing the game. 😆

Jerod, Mikeal, and Feross welcome Antoni Kepinski to the show to discuss his open source pizza ordering management web app. We talk about learning programming at a young age, how overwhelming web development can be these days, how Antoni decided which technologies to use, and more. This is a super fun conversation with many insights and takeaways for developers at every stage of their career.

Starring Lee Byron, Dan Schafer and Nick Schrock (co-creators of GraphQL) and other big names from the community [the documentary] explores the story of why and how GraphQL came to be and the impact it’s having on big tech companies worldwide.

GraphQL is exploding in popularity, and I love to see it getting moved out of Facebook and becoming a clearly independent project. Neat to see all the stuff happening in the community around it.

The GraphQL Foundation announcement last year was another reassurance that GraphQL is here to stay, after Facebook granted full patent rights to all GraphQL users two years ago.

While the legal situation around GraphQL is in the clear now, 4 years after its open-source release, the best practices and developments surrounding the still-emerging technology are still rapidly evolving.

If you like this stuff, you might also like a couple episodes of JSParty. Episode #38 is an interview with John Resig about GraphQL, while episode #72 is a panel discussion on the evolution of state management, including GraphQL.

Verrrry interesting:

EdgeDB combines the simplicity of a NoSQL database with relational model’s powerful querying, strictness, consistency, and performance.

It boasts strongly typed schemas, native GraphQL support, a rich standard library, built-in support for schema migrations, and more.

Use dinoQL to traverse JavaScript objects the same way you query APIs with GraphQL.

This is a very nice extension of the uniform access principle.

KBall MC’d a live show at React Amsterdam with a panel of 5 amazing React experts — Kitze, Michel Weststrate, Mike Grabowski, Vladimir Novick, and Andrey Okonetchnikov. It was a great discussion of state management solutions and the future of state management in the front-end.