GraphQL and Chill
Quick thoughts on GraphQL
- 2 mins
Yaay guys, this will be the first guest post on my blog and I’m super excited. I got a request from a friend. He had been following up with my post and wanted to feature, so why not?
Let’s Meet Ajani Eniola
I’m Ajani Eniola and here are a couple of interesting things about me:
- Progressive Web Application (PWA) Developer.
- I also do MEAN Stack Development.
- I preach RxJS observables.
- I’m probably one of the few tall guys in the world that don’t play basketball.
- I love slow music too.
Inspiration
Can REST truly be replaced?
If you had asked me this question exactly 9:05 am August 11 2017, trust me my reply would have been “ko le work”.
I should have been at the last meetup at Andela but because of a couple of unplanned events, I was unable to attend. While going through pictures from the event on twitter, I saw a slide from a presentation made by @timigod on GraphQL. Since then, I picked up interest in it and also discovered technologies like Apollo and Relay.
GraphQL Experience
GraphQL has been around since 2012 and used internally at Facebook but became open source for the public this year. Big boys like Github currently have their public APIs built on GraphQL.
While getting my hands dirty, I played around with GraphCool and Scaphold which are pretty good GraphQL Servers.
After some reading and trial and errors, I was able to build my own graphql server using MongoDB, Express JS and NodeJS. I hooked this spectacular backend to my front end that runs on angular2 apollo for handling request from the GraphQL backend.
The purpose of this experiment was to compare the time required for both a GraphQL Server and A RESTful API to handle and process a request. After setting up the two different environment, the GraphQL server used 5.22ms to return data to the client, while the RESTful API took 131.87ms to return the same data to the same client. I bet even The Flash can’t beat that!!!
In conclusion
In terms of access to the open source community, GraphQL is still in its early stages. There are still a lot of debates about it which will have effects on the adoption rate, but from this basic experiment, it is safe to say GraphQL is very fast in fetching data from a server and should be given a shot by developers.
Development
My GraphQL server is hosted on Github.
Want to contribute? Great! Fork the project and send in a pull request.
Also feel free to Tweet at me, I’ll be glad to brainstorm with you.
Cheers!!!
Olakanmi Oluwole
Cyber Security and Software Engineering.