A weekly newsletter of the best news, articles and projects about GraphQL

Martin Bonnin argues persisted queries let GraphQL adopt REST's strengths—CDN cacheability, predictability, standard HTTP tooling—while keeping low friction and per-field lifecycle control. The missing piece: protocol standardization.

This beginner-friendly tutorial by Chris Nwamba gives a thorough introduction to building a GraphQL server with the graphql-yoga library and Prisma as the data access layer.

Marc-André Giroux is working on the ecosystem API team at GitHub. He has written multiple articles about GraphQL schema design. In this article, he does a deep-dive into schema evolution.

GraphQL subscriptions are one of the newer features of GraphQL - they only have been added to the official specification about a year ago. They provide a mechanism for clients to subscribe to certain events and receive realtime updates from the server. Check out this tutorial to learn how to implement subscriptions in your own GraphQL server.

Designing proper mutations that are flexible and intuitive to use is not an easy task! In this article, Oleg Ilyenko (author of the Scala GrahQL implementation Sangria) shares his perspective on designing developer-friendly mutations. A very informative read!

Many developers are wondering about the best ways to deploy their GraphQL servers to the web! This tutorials teaches you how to a deploy GraphQL server to AWS Lambda using the awesome one-click deployment tool Apex Up.

This article by Ben Newman explains the usage of GraphQL directives with graphql-tools. Directives are a powerful way to enrich GraphQL schemas with custom functionality, like "enforcing access permissions, formatting date strings, auto-generating resolver functions for a particular backend API, marking strings for internationalization, synthesizing globally unique object identifiers, specifying caching behavior, skipping or including or deprecating fields, and just about anything else you can imagine".

Implementing permission rules in GraphQL servers is a domain where best practices still need to emerge. In this article, Dennis Walsh introduces the idea of implementing permissions via GraphQL directives. An elegant and declarative approach to a common problem in GraphQL server development.

Ruby developers watch out, this gem is for you (pun intented ?)! Learn how to build a GraphQL server from scratch using Sinatra with this excellent tutorial by Awin Abi.

Ever wondered what persisted queries actually are and how they work? This great article by Corey Clark from Ticketmaster has the answer!

This week, the Graphcool team introduced Prisma, an open-source GraphQL API layer that turns your database into a GraphQL API. Prisma is a GraphQL query engine and the core technology that's powering the Graphcool Framework. Its API can be used as the foundation for building your own GraphQL server or can be accessed directly from the frontend.

Matic Zavadlal wrote an excellent tutorial that explains how to implement GitHub authentication for your GraphQL server. Through the course of this tutorial, you'll learn how to build the API for a simple notes app that uses the GitHub login API for authentication functionality.

The <code>graphql-js</code> tutorial track on "How to GraphQL" has been updated. It's now a full introduction to building GraphQL servers with tools like <code>graphql-yoga</code>, Express.js and Prisma. It explains how to build a GraphQL API that offers filtering, pagination, sorting as well as authentication and realtime functionality with GraphQL subscriptions.

In this post, Samir Amzani describes Dailymotion's journey from REST to GraphQL. It's particularly interesting to learn about this transition as Dailymotion is operating at a huge scale, with more than 300 million unique users per months, adding up to 1 million API requests per day. Samir gives a great overview on the technical as wel as the organizational challenges, summarizing each section with a number of lessons learned. One of the key takeways from this article: "Treat your API as a product, and invest in making your API easy to use and understand". A well-written and very informative read!

In this tutorial, the team from Alligator.io gives an overview of the basic functionality of the open-source Graphcool Framework. The tutorial explains how to get started with a simple GraphQL service for a ToDo application, including an overview of serverless functions, authentication and permissions.

Are you new to GraphQL and looking to dive deeper but don't know where to start? Jamie Barton will be releasing an open-source eCommerce platform called CommerceQL. The best thing: He documents the process of building the platform in the form of a video tutorial. Stay tuned and subscribe to be notified when the course is ready!

This article distills GraphQL's two most common architectural use cases: <b>API Gateway</b> vs <b>GraphQL Native</b> applications. With the gateway pattern, GraphQL is used as a proxy layer on top of existing APIs. GraphQL Native backends are "designed from the ground up to use GraphQL", thus more gearing towards the idea of a "GraphQL database" where GraphQL provides an abstraction over an actual persistence store (like MySQL or MongoDB).

The "React & Apollo" fullstack tutorial on How to GraphQL has been updated to use Apollo Client 2.0 as well as the new Graphcool Framework. Check it out to learn how to implement features like authentication or realtime subscriptions in your React applications.

In this post, Chris Ball gives an overview of the Graphcool Framework. Starting with instructions for boostrapping a GraphQL server, over deploying it locally with Docker, up to integrating serverless functions and separating different development environments for staging and production, this article covers all relevant aspects of working with Graphcool.

Adam Yee, developer at Xero, with a great article about transitioning from REST to GraphQL. Adam gives many insights into the benefits they saw from switching to GraphQL, ranging from being able to delete much of their boilerplate and duplicated code over having more efficiency in data transfer over the network and easier state management inside the app to developer productivity.

In this post, Lewis Chung gives a technical deep dive into server-side rendering with React and Apollo Client. A really informative article with many great illustrations and code samples!

The static site generator Gatsby.js is proof that GraphQL is also a great use case for building static websites. This article takes a closer look at the architectural model for this use case, and in particular reflects on how GraphQL can be combined with serverless technologies to make life easy for static website providers.

Want to get started with building your own GraphQL server in Javascript? Rotimi Babalola wrote a comprehensive tutorial that walks you through the process of implementing a GraphQL backend using MongoDB, Express and the graphql-js reference implementation.

The Universe engineering team with a great write-up on their process of adopting GraphQL. They compiled five interesting benefits they got from using GraphQL, among them a better domain layer abstraction as well as typed request/response interfaces. Read on for the details, it's worth it!

In this post, Chase Doelling provides a great overview on the differences between GraphQL & REST. Great content especially if you're new to GraphQL!

Did you ever wonder what exactly GraphQL input types are? In this quick tutorial, David Mráz sheds some light on when and how these should be used.