At the  Distributed Summit 2020 , Allison Kunz, Solutions Engineer at Hasura, presented the talk “ Modernizing Application Development with Planet-scale GraphQL and Distributed SQL”. In the talk she covered what is GraphQL, why GraphQL, why Hasura GraphQL Engine, and a checklist of what it takes to have enterprise-grade GraphQL APIs in production, focusing on performance, security, and reliability. She also showed a demo of Hasura Cloud in action.

What is GraphQL, and why GraphQL?

In her talk, Allison defines GraphQL  as an API spec, like REST or SOAP. Originally created by Facebook, GraphQL was open sourced in 2015 and is now guided by the independent GraphQL foundation. It is data source agnostic, growing in popularity, and is supported by an enthusiastic community. The community is enthusiastic because of the many benefits GraphQL provides, such as automated documentation and auto-suggestion while writing queries, elimination of over-fetching of data, and reduced friction on both the frontend and backend supporting modern data-driven services. All of these benefits are great, especially for highly interconnected data and mobile applications.

#graphql #sql