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GraphQL for beginners

Danijel Vincijanović on February 14, 2020

Whoo, already five years have passed since Facebook publicly released GraphQL in 2015. It's not anymore just a new shiny thing - GraphQL ecosystem ...

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Erica Tanti • Feb 17 '20

Very well explained and simple to understand 🛸 Especially loved the gifs! May I ask what you used to make them?

Danijel Vincijanović • Feb 17 '20

Thanks a lot! 🙂 I was using PowerPoint! 😄 Recorded the presentation and converted video to the gif

Erica Tanti • Feb 17 '20

Interesting, thank you, hadn't thought of that! The gifs look super smooth, nice one 😁

Ivan Pozderac • Feb 19 '20

Great intro to the topic with cool examples, I like how you covered both frontend and backend so we know what is going on. Thanks on resources for further exploration, looking forward for more awesome articles from you! =D

Danijel Vincijanović • Feb 19 '20

Thanks mate! 🤘

Francis Irungu Munene • Feb 17 '20

Say I have a MSSQL/MySql/PostgreSQL database with two tables, to keep it simple, with say 10 and 20 fields respectively, I would have to write a separate resolver for all the 30 different fields? Can you show a simple example of such a use case?

Danijel Vincijanović • Feb 18 '20 • Edited

You don't have to write resolvers for each field. By default, if you didn't specify a resolver for a field, GraphQL will return an object property with the same name.

Imagine that you have "Spaceships" table with 30 fields. This will be our "main" resolver for querying all spaceships:

Query: {
    spaceships(obj, args, context, info) {
      return db.findAllSpaceships()
    }
}

And now, because we didn't write resolvers for Spaceship fields, GraphQL will return spaceship.model if we queried model field, spaceship.weight for weight field and same applies for every other queryable field. Hope that this makes sense 🙂

Fagner Brack • Feb 17 '20 • Edited

what are key differences between GraphQL and, most commonly used, REST API architectural style

Comparing both with their differences makes no sense, see this for the details

A REST API Architectural style is not to make a GET request on a given end-point and is not commonly used in the wild except for the "text/html" media type.