Saturday, 6 August 2022

New best story on Hacker News: GraphQL kinda sucks

GraphQL kinda sucks
473 by randytandy | 307 comments on Hacker News.
Graphql is great, but is totally over hyped. This is probably more of a rant or a frustrated dev outburst. but beginner to mid level developers are lead down the path of USE GRAPHQL especially on youtube... and this is just unfair and wrong. The good: - It makes working with describing the data you want easy - It can save you bandwidth. Get what you ask for and no more - It makes documentation for data consumers easy - It can make subscription easier for you to use - Can let you federate API calls The bad - It is actually a pain to use, depending on the backend you are using you'll have to manage two or more type systems if there are no code first generates in your language - It doesn't support map/tables/dictionaries. This is actually huge. I get that there might be some pattern where you don't want to allow this but for the majority of situations working with json api's you'll end up with a {[key: string] : T} somewhere - No clear path for Api versioning you'll end up with MyQueryV1.01 MyQueryV1.02 MyQueryV1.03 Don't use Graphql unless you're managing a solution/problem set that facebook intended graphql for Invest your time in a simpler solution then running to GraphQL first thanks for reading my ted talk please any senior dev's drop your wise words so that any new dev's can avoid tarpits