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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

With WAMP and crossbar.io, you can already directly query in SQL you PostGres db from the browser. So this does not give you real advanstages over existing solutions.

The real benefit of GraphQL is that it unifies stuff:

- several queries can be masqued as one; - several storages systems can be queried in one shot; - the cache layer can be integrated in the graphql server; - queries can actually no type in any backend and just run code; - the query doesn't hold logic, just data mapping. - queries can propagate events, trigger tasks, etc.

The graphql server is nice because it's an intermediary layer, separating your data manipulation from the rest of the logic in your system.

You definitly don't want you DB to be the only one doing the authentification/permissions nowaday, unless you want to script it to do social auth, OAuth, connect to a ldap, etc.

And you do want to be able to graphql your way into stuff that are not into your db.

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AGPL license is probably a non-starter for many/most potential use cases of crossbar.io.

GPLv2 was fine. But GPLv3 can make one look for alternatives. AGPL will cause many to simply lose all interest. I suspect GPLv3 is why we see so much MIT/BSD/Apache licensed software these days.

Very good point.

Where I can see this being really useful is for people trying out GraphQL for the first time. If you already know PostgreSQL, throwing this interface over it means the GraphQL bit is the only thing you've got to learn.

Indeed, I haven't though about that.

Agreed. My impression is that using this in a real project is almost a non-starter, but it's a good way for trying out GraphQL.

What? Why would it be a "non-starter"? It is made for being used for real, and people use it for real.

It's just that many people want to be able to use the software by doing modifications to it for their secret sauce. And they don't want to share the sauce. AGPL forces you to share it, even if you don't distribute the software: as long as you make a service with your modified version, you are legally entitled to share the modifications.

Of course, it's almost impossible to prove IRL, but still, a lot of corporations have problems with that. They want the free open source project to make them earn money, no price to pay.

Did you reply to the wrong post? It isn't AGPL, and corporations have nothing to do with what I said.

Because there are many benefits to using GraphQL that aren't supported if you explicitly tie the schema to the data source - one of them being the relative ease of supporting out-of-date clients. Another being the ease of supporting multiple data sources in the same schema, like Elasticsearch, Redis, etc (though I guess you can have PostgreSQL talk to those data sources instead).

My use of "real project" was perhaps a little unfair. What I mean is that as soon as you go beyond the simplest requirements of a GraphQL server, a solution like this is going to present more problems than it solves.

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