It would seem that every day, more and more companies have been pushing to introduce GraphQL in their modern applications, but what exactly is GraphQL and why should you be using it in your projects in 2021?

What is GraphQL?

GraphQL is a query language for reading and mutating data in APIs. It provides a complete and understandable description of the data in your API, gives clients the power to ask for exactly what they need and nothing more, makes it easier to evolve APIs over time, and enables powerful developer tools.

What problems does GraphQL solve?

Traditionally, Front-End Developers have consumed APIs using REST, where data entities exist on a group of URLs on a server. When a request is received the API responds with the full data payload of that entity. Although that sounds simple, there are two big disadvantages here.

The first disadvantage, is that we could need multiple entities at one time, in which case each request is under fetching the actual data we want.

The second disadvantage, is that we may only want a small part of that data (in which case we need to over fetch from the API and that is both costly, and bad for the environment).

GraphQL provides Back-End Developer's with a type system where they can describe a schema for the data, in turn this gives us Front-End Developers the power to explore and request the exact data we need from the API. With GraphQL, instead of multiple URLs an API has a single entry point where data is queried (or fetched) by describing it with a syntax that replicates its return shape in JSON. As Front-End Developers we can describe exactly the data we want while the Back-End Developer writes code to resolve the request. Best of all, everything happens in a syntax that can work agnostically with any programming language.

What is so amazing about types?

GraphQL APIs are organized in terms of types and fields, not endpoints. Using the type syntax in this way allows you to access the full capabilities of your data from a single endpoint. GraphQL uses types to ensure Apps only ask for what’s possible and provide clear and helpful errors. Apps can use types to avoid writing manual parsing code.