Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dirlewanger | Hacker News Reader

I've only given a cursory look into it, and with regards to building a JSON API in Rails (of which the many extant standards and their Rails libraries are still immature), is this just another fad, or an actual API standard that has staying power? It seems like the latter, but given that it's Facebook-backed, as soon as they get tired of it, they could pull a Google on it.

View on HN

There is a practical, functional GraphQL spec that has multiple client and server implementations. Regardless of whether Facebook continues to develop clients or maintains stewardship of the spec, GraphQL has a lengthy future ahead.

I have personally found it to be a practical, useful API standard that provides benefits over a JSON API in Rails. I wrote an article about some of the benefits a couple of years ago: https://0x2a.sh/from-rest-to-graphql-b4e95e94c26b.

You can architect "traditional" Rails APIs to get some of the similar benefits, but GraphQL works out of the box with existing client libraries.

We've been using GraphQL at Facebook in production for almost five years now, and it powers a huge amount of our iOS/Android app's API traffic. We also did a comprehensive revisit of the core concepts when we open sourced it in 2015, and we heavily use tools like GraphiQL internally. I can definitely assure you that Facebook's support/usage of GraphQL isn't a fad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com