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Comment by dopeboy | Hacker News Reader

As I'm reading the article and the discussion here, I'm seeing mostly talked around REST. How are folks supporting a GraphQL interface with Django? Also,

> Rule #17: Keep logic out of the front end

I'm curious how folks who use a db-to-api tool (e.g. Hasura) think of this? I'm currently working on a codebase that has Hasura and we're doing, what seems to me, a massive amount of logic in React. But as far as I know, there's no alternative under that scheme.

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I'm of the view that most of the DB-to-API tools are about empowering front-end developers to build full-stack applications. If you're already perfectly happy writing full-stack code, you're much less likely to be the target audience of such products. By essentially exposing your ORM over the wire, all you're doing is punting the responsibility of making sense of that data into the client. Increasingly i've been finding that the shape of persisted data isn't the best shape for _understanding_ that data, so I nearly always want some business logic layer that acts as a translator between the database and API domains.

Most of my work over the last few years (especially with using Relay + GraphQL) has been about pushing business logic back out of the client and into the server where it belongs for most apps (this isn't a universal rule). Client code can still do lightweight transformation of data, but i'm a huge proponent of keeping client codebases as lean as possible.

We are doing the same, and are quite happy with it. This means that very often, implementing a new feature can be done exclusively on the frontend, as opposed to spending time on both the frontend and the backend as we would with the old-school approach.

(from hasura)

With Hasura, if you need want some server-side logic to be written away as an API, you could try 2 approaches:

1. Write a REST/GraphQL API in your favourite framework and bring them in as Actions/Remote-Schemas in Hasura. Hasura will add them to the GraphQL API. 2. If you like, and if its possible, you can also abstract away logic in database functions and then Hasura will expose them.

I use Elm on the frontend with a fully type safe generated client lib (based on the GraphQL schema Hasura provides). Fully type safety over the API barrier and in the frontend.

https://github.com/cies/elm-hasura-dockered

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