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Ask HN: What do you think of GraphQL?

14 points by burtonator ↗ HN
I created a poll on Twitter here:

https://twitter.com/socializ3r/status/1527721872296665089

... go vote but would love to hear your thoughts on GraphQL.

I'm not going to bias the vote by giving my personal opinion but would love to hear yours.

10 comments

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Sohcahtoa82
When I first saw GraphQL, I was like "This is some overengineered shit that is going to be the next cargo cult"

Then I got actual exposure to it, and I think it's amazing in certain scenarios. You can easily make CRUD apps that allow a front-end to pick which database rows you want to update, and you create a metadata file that describes the database and applies permissions.

You get so many things for free, and the result is you have far less code to write and fewer bugs, especially around RBAC.

That being said, like many technologies, there will be people that try to use it for things it shouldn't be used for.

burtonator
GraphQL or not... cargo cult explains a lot of what happens in tech.

Basically, "Google does X so my smaller company should do X too."

That's just VERY often not the case.

taubek
What do you think is the reason for this? Is it maybe something along the line "If company X uses it, and they are big, this standard / technology will for sure stay here some time"?
undefeated
I think it's more like "Company X is big and we have to be like company X if we want to be big too"
charlie0
A large part of it is "FANG does x y,z and I want to work at FANG. So I must so x,y,z at smaller company."
vermasque
Compared to REST APIs, I like how it eliminates the coarse-grained vs. fine-grained decision for designing queries in APIs. You can just spec out the model and let the clients decide what they need.