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Comment by westoncb | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know what framework the book uses (if any)?

I tried doing a GraphQL project in Python/Django recently, using Graphene for the GraphQL bits. I didn't end up getting that far because the documentation was so lacking, as were examples generally (for graphene-python I mean; I could find stuff on GraphQL in the abstract).

I'm thinking about giving it another shot, maybe on node.js this time, largely because I get the impression that the supporting tech for it is more mature there—but I'd love to hear opinions on what the most mature lib for using it is at the moment (whatever language)!

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Don't give up on Python! The eco-system is young, but it is there. Saturday just gone, I gave a presentation at PyLondinium [1] on "GraphQL in Python" (Slides: [2], video to follow). For the purpose of the presentation, I put together a simple server example [3].

[1]: https://pylondinium.org/ [2]: https://alexchamberlain.github.io/presentation-pylondinium-g... [3]: https://github.com/alexchamberlain/city-api/

The ecosystem is young?

Python is older than HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Java, C#, etc.

He means the Python+GraphQL ecosystem – and he's right, Graphene-Python and graphql-core are still evolving and changing their interfaces, and there's essentially no useful documentation beyond trivial examples.

It's node: `apollo-server-express`

https://www.apollographql.com/docs/apollo-server/

I've felt the same about the documentation for graphene. It's vary basic. I've also had a struggle using subscriptions with the graphql-ws library. No explanations of how to actually hook subscriptions to some sort of pubsub system or anything like that. I figured it out enventually on my own but it did feel like I was fighting against he grain by not just using nodejs for the server component and proxying calls to my python services.

We have a significant investment in python so it was a question of spending time training backend devs on JS for one service or working out the kinks and having one of us become the expert to help others. I think we got to a point where we are ok with graphene and al. but I can't direct my team towards any decent documentation. I'm basically going to have to write my own cookbook style docs for them. Not a huge deal but I'd say if you have the option I'm not convinced you should go the python route today as the nodejs ecosystem for graphql is much more mature (yet still has a long way to go).

I'm pretty sure the GraphQL gains will be worth it in the end but we are all early adopters right now, regardless of stack.

From what I've seen by glancing through, it's mostly JS -- Node.js (express-graphql), React, and packages from the Apollo GraphQL team (react-apollo). I've been using these over the last year and can recommend checking them out.

It says right there in the post:

"We’ll be looking at the core fundamentals of GraphQL along with strategies for how to implement it (client-side with Apollo and server-side in Node.js)"

Actually that's missing the piece of data I was looking for: which Node.js libraries/frameworks (for interacting with GraphQL) is it discussing.

The specific import of the server lib is the non-Apollo express-graphql, which is under the graphql org on GitHub. I only looked briefly, not sure if there’s another example. I know the book is still a work in progress.

I believe the book is all in NodeJS. As for the most mature lib, I’d say Apollo.

Apollo is client-side though, no? I mean for integrating with server code.

The Apollo team has apollo-server and apollo-engine-js. I've had good results with both of those.

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