GraphQL is a query language for APIs that enables declarative data fetching in order to give the client the power to specify exactly the data that is needed from the API. It makes easier to evolve APIs over time.

Now that we know what GraphQL is, I want to clarify what it is not, as I feel that there is still some confusion about it.

Firstly, it does not have anything to do with databases. It is not an alternative to SQL or a brand new ORM.

Secondly, it is not a REST replacement, but an alternative. You don't have to pick between one and the other, they can happily co-exist in the same project.

Last but not least, GraphQL is not complicated or scary. It is quite easy to understand its declarative nature and exactly how it is possible to take the best from it.

GraphQL was developed internally by Facebook in 2012 before being open-sourced in 2015, with its stable version released just in June 2018. On 7 November 2018, the GraphQL project was moved from Facebook to the newly-established GraphQL Foundation, hosted by the non-profit Linux Foundation.

Lee Byron, GraphQL's creator, aims to make GraphQL omnipresent across web platforms.

GraphQL is being used by teams off all sizes, in many different environments and languages. The main companies that are using GraphQL are Facebook, Github, Pinterest and Shopify.

REST was defined by Roy Fielding, a computer scientist that presented the REST principles in his PhD dissertation in 2000.

REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that defines a set of constraints which make any web service – a true RESTful API.

Client-server architecture means that the user-interface concerns should be separated from the data storage concerns to improve the user interfaces portability across multiple platforms.

A stateless server does not persist any information about the user who uses the API. This means that the server does not remember if the user is sending is first request or not.

REST API responses must define themselves as cachable or non-cachable to prevent clients from providing any inappropriate data that can be used on future requests.

A Layered system means that if a proxy or load balancer is placed between client and server, the connections between them should not be affected, and the client did not know if is connected to the end server or not.

A Uniform interface suggests that it should be a uniform way of interacting with a given server despite the device or application type (website, mobile app). The main guideline is that each resource has to be identified on requests.

Why was GraphQL created if there's already REST

There are two main reasons why companies such as Facebook, Netflix and Coursera started developing alternatives to REST:

In the early 2010s, there was a boom in mobile usage, which led to some issues with low-powered devices and sloppy networks. REST isn't optimal to deal with those problems;

As mobile usage increased, so did the number of various front-end frameworks and platforms that run customer applications. Given REST's firmness, it was harder to develop a single API that could fit the prerequisites of each customer.

      If we go even further, we realize that the main reason why an alternative solution was identified was because most of the 
      data used in modern web and mobile applications has a graph shape. For instance, news pieces have comments, and 
      those comments may have features such as likes or spam flags, which are created or reported by users. This example 
      describes how a graph looks like.

      Consequently, Facebook started developing GraphQL. At the same time, Netflix and Coursera were also working on 
      alternatives themselves. After Facebook open-sourced GraphQL, Coursera dropped their efforts and adopted the new 
      tech. Netflix, however, continued developing their own REST alternative and later open sourced Falcor.

In this section I will go point by point through a practical example, comparing REST to GraphQL in order to demonstrate the flexibility of Facebook's query language.

Imagine that you have a blog, and you want the front page to show all the latest posts. In order to achieve this, you need to fetch the posts, so you will probably do something like this:

But what if you want to see the author as well? You have three options to achieve this:

Modify the resource to also return the author:

Create a new resource that returns the posts with the author:V

The goal is to provide a brief explanation to anyone who still has not got to know GraphQL, clarify exactly what it does better than REST.

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