Hacker News Reader

Comment by schickling | Hacker News Reader

Hi, co-founder of Graphcool here. It's very exciting to see AWS adopting GraphQL as a part of their offering. GraphQL in combination with serverless functions is a great fit to build applications quickly and shines in the use case described by AppSync.

P.S. We'll soon release a few example of how to use AppSync together with Graphcool (which works really well together!)

View on HN

Isn't this basically a copy of Graphcool?

I was actually just about to comment how it sucks for startups that AWS will just grab every good idea, duplicate it and draw a lot of business because, since you have everything on AWS, it's very tempting to just use their offering.

While there are a couple of similar elements (you can rudimentary read and write data), the use case AppSync is trying to tackle is very different. It's main use case is not to act as the core of your application but rather as a wrapper around various AWS data sources.

There's a new concept called schema stitching which enables you to combine (and re-expose) GraphQL APIs which will make it possible to build a simple server that stitches together both Graphcool (as your primary data backend) and AppSync to easily access other information stored in AWS services. (You can read more about schema stitching here: https://www.advancedgraphql.com/content/schema-stitching)

Could you also write a client side graphql server to do the stitching locally? Is there a reason you wouldn't want to in general?

They didn't copy the idea. They acquired scaphold.io which is like graphcool

I just visited scraphold and there is no mention of an acquisition.

this is insider info ;)

Internet forums are not your friend. Be careful.

(for everyone wondering, the insider info was simply a guess. Scaphold shutdown 4 months ago and suddenly AWS has something that looks just like it)

I have heard the same

Does Graphcool have mobile sync clients? That seems like a big differentiator, and puts AWS AppSync up against other cloud-backed storage vendors like Realm and Couchbase. A sync client backed by GraphQL is just icing on the cake, offering much more flexibility on the backend.

One really neat thing is that the clients are based on the MIT-licensed Apollo Client. So we hope that everyone using GraphQL can easily get these benefits! Check out the code on GitHub: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-mobile-appsync-sdk-js/blob/25...

(Disclaimer: I work on the Apollo team)

I was not aware of Apollo... Thanks for the link. Looks great. Just went down a rabbit hole on offline support for Apollo, and looks like people are working on some elegant solutions.

I've been using https://github.com/Malpaux/apollo-offline for offline support in production for a few months now and it has worked very well. I discovered one issue but the maintainer was very responsive and had my PR merged in and published within 24 hours.

Besides the reasons listed below, Graphcool's move to making the platform an open source framework is another distinguishing factor.

I refactored a CLI tool I'm creating with it the day they released the OSS framework, and it's working fantastically!

Edit - Nevermind, I must have confused the personal experience of myself and multiple people in my professional network with a satirical television show.

That is interesting - can you recall some instances of this occurring?

He just saw the Silicon Valley episode

Very exciting... Until you see your user base start shrinking.

There is no way Graphcool can compete with Amazon in terms of software costs and efficiency. If someone is already using other Amazon services like S3, SNS, etc... and they have to choose between a completely new third party service or Amazon's own; they will choose Amazon. If both software are compatible, companies will always choose the cheapest one.

Amazon has the ability to price gouge the service down to $0 if it likes.

Also, Graphcool is not the first and only service of its kind, there is also Apollodata (from the MeteorJS people).

Apollo by itself doesn't do anything close to what Graphcool does out of the box.

As a Graphcool user, I very much see how Graphcool is NOT threatened by Appsync, but is merely complimentary.

Appsync sure does perform the lower level part of what Graphcool does.

But the added value of Graphcool was never this to me. The added value of graphcool is generating a complex schema with authentication and automatic resolution, actually writing for you hundreds of custom complex resolver functions for filters, authentication and so on. These are things that appsync does not do.

But Appsync will come as a very easy to use backend for Graphcool, making it even cheaper and scalable (Appsync is based on dynamodb, while graphcool is based on SQL, but is actually searching for new scalable backends)

I dont understand how it will work with AppSync if both services practically do the same thing? am i missing something?

Bravo on the optimism. Personally I'd be crapping myself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com