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Comment by throw_m239339 | Hacker News Reader

GraphQL is 2010's SOAP. Whatever happens in the database is not GraphQL concern. GraphQL is just a contract between the client and the server, and a better one than HATEOAS or whatever REST.

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Thanks for saying that. I haven’t used GraphQL but when I read about it I was like “Isn’t this basically RPC again? Like XML-RPC (for those that remember that) and SOAP?”

To me the acid test, since getting burnt by both XML-RPC and SOAP has always been “can I drop a standard HTTP proxy Like nginx between this thing the layer behind or in front to cache reads?”

GraphQL _seems_ like you can’t really do that so you end up having to build caching into your app, which in turn - in my experience - always leads to systems you can’t predictably reason about

You can cache reads with a HTTP proxy. I know that’s what we are doing at work anyways.

You generally wouldn’t run a cache in front of your GraphQL server, but can definitely have a cache between your data sources and your GraphQL resolvers. For instance, we have a single GraphQL interface in front of many backing micro services. Some of those are very hot and constantly handle direct reads, others only access the backing services through redis reads, others basically do REST requests (which are cached as normal) and drop unrequested fields (basically the BFF pattern from the article), and others even have hybrid approaches where accessing a certain subset of available fields sends you to a cache and accessing others triggers a live read. The resolver architecture gives you a lot of flexibility, but it also can enable a lot of complexity (though it is fairly easy to reason about because all of the connections are explicit). We’re a big org, so we’d have complexity either way, and switching to GraphQL has absolutely been a huge improvement that no one regrets (though we’ve learned a lot along the way).

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