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Comment by daliwali | Hacker News Reader

You are correct that in a REST system, every resource has a "primary key", that is the URL.

Where you are wrong is that REST doesn't mandate that a resource can only be accessed by its "primary key". There is nothing stopping me from requesting the following URL:

GET /users/daliwali?fields=name&include=friends,friends.country

Any client would be able to follow that link and get something out of it, whether it's JSON or HTML, without needing specialized tooling such as a GraphQL client. A hyperlink makes that query widely accessible and interoperable with any HTTP client.

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We're reasoning about a simple case, however. GraphQL is recursive, and HTTP parameters are generally not. You can use them to wrap a recursive language, but at that point you're just using the URL as a transport layer for the recursive language, and if the language is expressive enough it won't fit in a GETtable URL anyway... Past a threshold of complexity, you get into wanting that GraphQL client.

In reply to fixermark, there is also nothing stopping you from very complicated queries in REST. There is not even a requirement that the server must respond immediately. For example I could request:

POST /queries

With some raw database query as the payload (please don't actually do this) and the server could respond with HTTP 202 Accepted, meaning that it's going to take some time to process, meanwhile check back at the URL in the Location header when it's finished.

REST does not mandate any upper bound on complexity, that's up to you to decide.

But at this point, it's so different and you've added so much work to it, I doubt anyone would recognize it as originally REST. You're basically rewriting GraphQL yourself. And sure, you're allowed to do that, but why?

>it's so different and you've added so much work to it

With web pages, it's standard and effortlessly handled by the browser. Given a form with inputs specified by the server, a client sends a request with media type application/x-www-form-urlencoded or multipart/form-data. There is a vast number of implementations for practically every language and platform. A machine client can send a form too, or JSON for that matter.

You have it backwards, Facebook is attempting to rewrite web standards by themselves. And that is undermining the open web.

> In reply to fixermark, there is also nothing stopping you from very complicated queries in REST.

What I believe others are getting at is that those complicated queries themselves need to be expressed somehow even within a REST request. GraphQL provides a convenient mechanism for doing so.

In theory you can even do GraphQL RESTfully, with each REST endpoint exposing its own schema. But in doing so it quickly becomes apparent that it would be easier just to forego REST conventions and expose a single consolidated schema.

Speaking for my own GraphQL experiences, on one project we had a GraphQL query generating reports that was around 50 lines long, with half a dozen fragments. Flattened out to match the approaches you've suggested for POST data and GET params it would have been hundreds of attributes. It's unclear that there's any open standard that would have provided as simple of a solution for expressing and executing those requests.

that's almost exactly what a graphql get looks like

    http://myapi/graphql?query={me{name}}

http://graphql.org/learn/serving-over-http/#get-request

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