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Comment by tacker2000 | Hacker News Reader

tacker2000

Well I hope Shopify will have enough third party app developers in the future, now that they have moved everything to GraphQL and Remix (and killed all the other SDKs, like PHP for example), and now that we willhave a non-React Remix soon.

Im pretty sure not many devs will switch to Remix just to work on Shopify Apps…

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GraphQL is such a pain. The SDKs are usually bloated. Debugging is a nightmare. Documentation on those APIs feeling adhoc. Outside of rare use-cases, I feel like 99% of the time GraphQL is engineering overkill than a simple resource-based REST interface.

The funniest thing about GraphQL is when it's set up to only allow specific whitelisted queries. Incredible.

Relay (and hence GraphQL) does solve some problems that have no immediate solution with REST - over/under fetching (data masking, fragment colocation in components) and automatic cache normalisation, but they are mostly problems you would only have at scale with disconnected frontend teams working on a product. The typesafety you get from a compiler and an automatically generated schema is nice too.

Yea, i also dont like GraphQL. Why they needed to replace the good old REST interface, which was working perfectly, I will never understand.

The tech team there seems to be making some shortsighted decisions in the last couple of years. Lets see if its going to bite them in the long run...

Automatic type a client generation that is extremely mature.

Even when using OpenAPI it’s not as good

GraphQL has validation built in, that’s another big one. For non complex and non-specialized types it validates against the schema quite well.

Query caching is dead simple and quite good

I'm convinced Shopify only bought Remix since so many Shopify shops started using Next.js as an external storefront. Shopify realized their moat was dissapearing and if users could roll their own storefront, they were one step closer to rolling their own backend.

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