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

The GraphQL ecosystem grows with more database connectors. GRANDstack is a frontend-backend-database stack with the Neo4j Graph Database. In a similar spirit to GraphQL-to-SQL mapping tools, GRANDstack helps build GraphQL APIs that leverage the Neo4j graph database. Watch this 20-minute video which covers bootstrapping an application, the development workflow, and deployment to Netlify.

In this short video, Sezgi discusses how error handling should be done according to the GraphQL specification and how this translates to Apollo and Relay which take a slightly different approach.

A to-the-point 15-minute video tutorial on how to build a notifications component in React with Apollo Client to handle GraphQL Subscriptions. The tutorial starts with an empty repository all the way to a working client-side GraphQL subscription.

This talk by Robert Zhu sheds some light on the roles and responsibilities of the GraphQL Foundation, Working-group, and steering committee. He also discusses the upcoming improvements to the GraphQL ecosystem projects, such as GraphQL.org and GraphiQL. Robert continues to share some potential and promising proposals for additions to the specification, summarizing the direction of GraphQL’s future in the upcoming years.

Take a look at this collection of videos from the GraphQL Asia 2020 conference. This playlist includes a variety of interesting talks, including API management and governance for GraphQL, better IoT with Serverless GraphQL, Authorization for GraphQL, and many other presentations.

In a straightforward video tutorial, Nadir Dabit shows how one can build a simple messageboard with different colored messages with React, GraphQL, and Amplify DataStore. At the end of the video he demonstrates how the app behaves offline. At a concise 8 minutes, the tutorial is a quick view into the usage of the Amplify DataStore project.

2020 will mark five years since GraphQL was released. In this video, some of the most influential members of the GraphQL community, including Lee Byron, co-creator of GraphQL, reflect on their journey, and where GraphQL is headed next.

In this talk, Sean Grove from OneGraph explores the current state GraphQL tooling. Sean argues that GraphQL helps accelerate API adoption through developer happiness and the practices it encourages. The talk covers the role of APIs in achieving business goals and demonstrates how the latest practices and tooling assist in the development and adoption of GraphQL APIs.

Interfaces are a core feature of the GraphQL spec. They help connect your graph and make for a better querying experience. In this talk, Ryan goes over when and how to use interfaces, and how to leverage them in schema design to create a great experience for API consumers.

Reduce development time and create consistent and dynamic front-end interfaces which are always up-to-date with your back-end GraphQL API by utilizing the introspection query to reveal an API's schema, automatically generate queries and mutations, and, ultimately, hydrate typed React components. Check out Greg Brimble's presentation from Byteconf GraphQL 2020 where he details how to efficiently render GraphQL inputs and the use cases that come with a strongly typed schema.

In this tutorial, Leigh Halliday walks through Cursor based GraphQL Pagination in Apollo React. Apollo provides a function made for fetching additional paginated results, and implementing cursor-based pagination on the client isn't all that different from offset-based pagination. Leigh live codes an example project and explains how, instead of using an absolute offset, we keep a reference to the last object fetched and information about the sort order used in order to apply cursor-based pagination.

In this video, Joe delves into building a GraphQL client with MongoDB, using the new GraphQL on MongoDB's Serverless platform, Stitch. The video is very beginner friendly and Joe guides in an easy going and cheerful way through the whole process.

Listen in to Byteconf GraphQL 2020, an online conference with several influential speakers such as Eve Porcello, William Lyon, Nader Dabit, and more. There are tutorials on GraphQL servers with Express, thoughts on leveraging the power of a typed schema, and talks about the misconception of GraphQL.

In this talk, Kylie Stewart explores APIs and the evolution of best practices. She unpacks how those evolving practices brought us to GraphQL and how this query language might benefit your codebase, with examples along the way.

Follow along with Ben Award as he discovers a performance problem related to GraphQL and how he manages to debug and fix it. He examines beta type-graphql performance and looks for optimization by lowering the number of results fetched.

This presentation by Michael Watson, a customer success engineer from Apollo, shares the best practices for your GraphQL schema and client operations. He starts with some common do’s and don’ts for your schema that will help clients more easily consume your graph. Then, he covers some common pitfalls seen in GraphQL operations and the changes that can be made to bring some clarity into your graph.

Watch Ben Awad’s live coding session where he explores the N+1 problem when building a GraphQL server. He shares some solutions that utilize DataLoader and database joins to combat against this common issue. Follow along as he breaks apart each technique and takes a look at join-monster, a library that takes the GraphQL query and does conditional joining.

This talk by Sean Grove at ReasonConf US 2019 discusses the benefits to using OneGraph, a GraphQL service that wraps and connects the internet’s SaaS APIs. Sean steps through how processing a request to OneGraph looks like and also provides a demo on OneGraphiQL, which helps visually build and explore GraphQL queries.

Learn from Ruben Oostinga as he presents at the GraphQL London #11 on federation, managed GraphQL services, and persistent queries. He explains why GraphQL will solve many technical and organizational challenges s you can focus on building business value. Ruben also shares useful tools like graphql-transform-federation, swagger, and more to help quickly support your micro service architecture.

Listen to this talk at the GraphQL Berlin Meetup as Flavian Desverne shares the challenges of building type-safe GraphQL servers with a database. He demos building a backend while focusing on end to end type safety, zero-config, conventions over configurations, no boilerplate, and more.

In Charles Lee’s talk, he presents on how Shopify has been updating and deprecating one of their most used GraphQL APIs, with the help of permissions, visibility markers, and versioning. He explores the setup of their GraphQL API and explains why Shopify has versioned schemas, which helps local development provide checks to ensure version constraints.

In a video tutorial, Ben Awad does a walkthrough and gives an explanation for a GraphQL Typescript boilerplate that he created. The boilerplate includes authentication via sessions and the github repo itself offers instructions on how to later deploy the app to Heroku or DigitalOcean.

In her talk from the 8th GraphQL SF Meetup, Christina Yu shares her lessons learned relating to GraphQL errors in her team at Paypal. At first she covers how they handled the errors and subsequently discusses how they tracked and optimised them. To track them she used a Grafana dashboard and a product called Apollo Graph Manager, as well as other Apollo tools.

In this presentation, James Lawrie from The New York Times shares the number of queries served, data received and served, and the large amount of types and fields in their schema in order to demonstrate how GraphQL has helped the company scale to their current size. Listen in on how they handled geo-targeting, schema directives, active cache invalidation, and more.

This talk discusses different state management that works well with GraphQL as well as how to use hooks to manage state. Shruti Kapoor explores the use of Redux along with GraphQL and the challenges, like immutability and the huge boilerplate. She demos using hooks with a React app that takes advantage of GraphQL to reduce the amount of data to state manage.

Guillaume Scheibel presents at Devoxx Belgium 2019 on how the engineering team at Expedia implemented GraphQL and improved its APIs functionality. The speaker breaks down the reasons why Expedia switched to GraphQL, the team’s challenges with REST, and the inconsistencies amongst types. He shares the architecture behind a cohesive API experience and live codes how to generate schemas from Kotlin types with the open source project GraphQL-Kotlin.

Nik Graf speaks at the React Advanced 2019 Conference on some tips for better designing GraphQL schemas. He shares his thoughts on explicit naming, aliases, nullable fields, and connections, as he provides sample code snippets of good and bad examples. For anyone defining GraphQL schemas, learn how to maintain your schemas over time from the lessons Nik suggests.

Tim Suchanek at ViennaJS walks through a step by step tutorial on building a full-stack application using Apollo Client, GraphQL Nexus, Photon.js, and GraphQL Code Generator. He live codes to demonstrate adding a field to GraphQL queries on the frontend and to the schema. He also discusses the importance of type safety and how developers can practice end-to-end type safety to be more efficient with their code.

This talk by James Neate from the 2019 Platform Summit focuses on the implications of interacting with GraphQL and REST APIs while comparing the two from a consumer perspective. He live demos in real time the differences between approaching both APIs when building user interfaces. Watch as James compares REST and GraphQL responsiveness, usability, documentation, and more.

Check out this talk at the React Advanced 2019 by Bernardo Raposo where he provides his presentation slides as well as all the resources to get started with figma-graphql. He presents how to utilize the Figma API and convert GraphQL queries into styles for your components. The talk includes other frontend tools you can use to provide easier access to design files, have responsive image components, and more.

Nader Dabit’s presentation at the ReactiveConf 2019 discusses how developers are using GraphQL as an API gateway to handle unexpected use cases. He first introduces modern AWS technologies where he goes over useful tools such as AWS AppSync and Amplify Framework. Some cases include passing the query to Lambda or Serverless functions for processing or even writing geospatial and time-based queries.