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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

> It's called REST APIs and we've known how to do them since 2001.

The aim of GraphQL insofar as I understand it is that instead of having to develop two things (a front-end and a back-end REST API that talks to your database or other services), you need just one (a front-end that talks to GraphQL). Mind you, graphQL becomes the back-end-for-front-end then, and will still need a lot of work. The main point is that with GraphQL you'll only need one for all of your apps, while traditionally you'd write one REST API for each client.

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> you'd write one REST API for each client.

Erm... What?

Granted, web requirements are a bit different from mobile requirements, but still. Why would you write one REST API for each client?

Because requirements are different. Our admin GUI needs much more data and different access controls than our web and mobile apps. Third party consumers have even more different requirements.

We never need to bikeshed with developers from all other teams to make sure things are consistent or whatever.

We generate endpoints from a Swagger spec. With good abstractions it is not much work. Frontend devs do modifications to these endpoints as well since they are so trivial.

> Because requirements are different. Our admin GUI needs much more data and different access controls than our web and mobile apps.

Indeed. And how does GraphQL solve the need for different data and different access controls to that data? :)

Not sure, I haven't seen a good story for it. We'll stick with REST.

I don't think APIs in general should have anything to do with authorization, other than passing along a token.

> you'll only need one for all of your apps,

So where are my clients for statically typed languages? I looked into GraphQL and promptly dropped it cause I couldn't seem to call into it from Java in any sensible way. If all your "apps" are javascript, maybe this is true, but that hardly makes it a universal technology.

It could have better documentation but here's the Java client for Android: https://github.com/apollographql/apollo-android There's also a Swift client available: https://www.apollographql.com/docs/ios/

That looks pretty decent indeed, and makes me a lot more hopeful about the promises of GraphQL, but it sounds like its an Android specific implementation, rather then something I could actually use for JVM service-to-service communication.

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