With the zeitgeist of programming ever-changing, it can be difficult to determine what is a fad and what is going to last. One of the tools that has survived is GraphQL, an alternative to the standard RESTful route’s approach for queries and manipulating data. I decided to tackle the fundamentals of the open source project last week and I can see why it is so popular.

• GraphQL is an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs, and a runtime for fulfilling queries with existing data.
• GraphQL was developed internally by Facebook in 2012 before being publicly released in 2015.
• GraphQL supports reading, writing (mutating), and subscribing to changes to data (realtime updates — most commonly implemented using WebHooks).

GraphQL provides an approach to developing web APIs and has been contrasted with REST architectural style. It allows clients to define the structure of the data required, and the same structure of the data is returned from the server, therefore preventing excessively large amounts of data from being returned.

#graphql #graphql server