We see a lot of articles that tout the features of graphql, praising its advantages over rest API’s, I do mostly agree with these articles, but I’ll like to present its advantages from another perspective — by elaborating some issues I had integrating a 50+ rest api in an app.

Issue #1 What You See is Not Always What You Get.

API Documentation isn’t documentation when it doesn’t accurately represent the complete range of input-output relationships.

The api docs whilst mostly accurate, left me guessing at which data types were accepted and the range of values fields could take.

Using a standard rest API felt like I had to have “faith” on the documentation in exactly what had to be returned, and frustration ensued when it didn’t correlate with expectations.

#rest-api #graphql #graphql-vs-rest #api