Om.next from a Relay / GraphQL Perspective

The pattern could be called "social proof sophistry". It first involves social proof:

    - the reputation of a known figure or organization
    - marketing techniques
    - blog posts from converts

    - fragmented subsystems
    - sophistry / obfuscation in documentation
    - increasing boilerplate by not establishing patterns

What happens when people devote time and energy? The become committed. By the time people get to a simple prototype they have already sunk enough effort into it that they would feel foolish for not continuing.

They invest further resources and speak positively about the framework in order to feel consistent. They might even feel like writing a half-informed blog post just to feel ahead of the crowd, which further increases the social proof + obfuscation.

Actually, I am not being fair. There are some interesting ideas that came out of the whole collection of technologies: React, Relay and GraphQL. Among those interesting ideas:

1.) Components should be mostly immutable (favor props over state)

2.) one way data flow

3.) Relay containers: the component and the query that gets data for that component should be married together, so a developer can easily see what data a component needs, and the query never goes out of date

4.) combine all queries at a higher level -- the highest level container combines the queries from all the lower level containers, so you end up with one query. Relay also runs a diff on the info it has, versus the info it needs, so the query is always optimized for maximum efficiency. This has many advantages over the RESTful approach.

My criticisms of the system:

1.) this is a ridiculous among of boilerplate. I can hardly believe how much I have to write by hand. I do get that some of this is only because of the immaturity of the system. A year from now there will probably be command line tools that will give us some of the automation that we might expect from something like Ruby On Rails. Given a schema, I should not have to write, by hand, all of my Types and Connections and Models -- much of that can be inferred.

2.) Mutations -- in the middle of all of this beautiful Functional programming, they dredged up a classic Object Oriented pattern and they made it as painful as possible. The amount of boilerplate needed for mutations is really amazing. What should be 1 line of code takes 40 lines.

With all that said, I am 100% excited about GraphQL. It does seem to me very much a win over RESTful APIs, for all the reasons mentioned here:

http://www.draconianoverlord.com/2015/08/11/rest-is-aging-gr...

If the author is reading this, I'm curious what parts of the documentation you're talking about here.