Summary of GraphQL Europe Conference

During this weekend I had a great experience at the GraphQL Europe Conference in Berlin.

Available slides

• Adding GraphQL to your existing architecture by Sashko Stubailo
• Building global GraphQL API distribution by Jakub Riedl
• Fighting legacy codebases with GraphQL and Rails by Netto Farah
• GraphQL - Evolution or Revolution? by Jonas Helfer
• Launching GitHub’s Public GraphQL API by Brooks Swinnerton
• MockQ buddy! Easy API Driven Design and Accurate Documentation with GraphQL by Alison Johnston
• Using GraphQL in a Mesh Network to Enable Real-Time Collaboration by Tommy Lillehagen

Notes

Below is a brief summary of the common decisions, lessons learnt, solutions and thoughts from the speakers at the conference, about how to use GraphQL in production at scale:

• To use GraphQL in a near real-time fashion, the language will need an extension that sends query + subscription at the same time.
• There are different types of queries with trade-offs: Static, compiled + optimizations, whitelisted, dynamic, persisted [1][2].
• You will want to apply instrumentation of queries and only optimize those that data shows are slow.
• Cache queries & results, e.g. HTTP cache headers & client/server-side caching via DataLoader.
• N+1 problem – and the solution is batching queries. There are tools for this.
• Subscriptions vs Live Queries exist with different use-cases, we’re interested in Subscriptions.
• Use the Schemas/Types. Nice optimizations can be implemented when relying on the AST for the Schemas/Types. E.g. Don’t have any mutations in a query? Then redirect the underlying query to use the read-only replica DB, otherwise hit the write/read one.
• Client-driven development – the client (or the User of the thing) sets the constraints and interfaces
• Use Fragments as a first primitive. Look at col(l)ocation.
• Optimistic UIs.
• Apollo Optics: Store data about the query, like SQL statements that were generated.
• Ruby gem to annotate definitions with accepted_scopes // authorization layer on top of resolution.
• Public/Private separation of schemas for dev/production separation.
• Pagination via first/last parameters - perhaps add offset?
• is/has/can prefixes for boolean values
• Directives, new ones like @defer, @future are coming.
• Rate limiting/Throttling of queries.
• Use GraphiQL for explorative development.
• GraphQL IDL by GRAPHCOOL.
• GraphQL Voyager - Visual Representation for the Schema.
• GraphQL Faker - mock data.
• GraphQL Docs - generate docs from schemas.
• Think about versioning.
• Useful tools at awesome-graphql.
• EDIT: It’s now possible to use neo4j with GraphQL.

The conference receives several 👍 from me.

Great work, let’s hope we get to go next year as well!