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Comment by i_phish_cats | Hacker News Reader

SPARQL demands a certain data model (triple stores). Also, everything about it smells like ivory-tower academic snobbery + ultra-large-enterprise crap. GraphQL does neither.

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Funny that ultra-large-enterprise crap could be applied to Facebook and GraphQL?

GraphQL also demands a certain data model. Just that it is not standardized. And no, RDF/XML is not the only representation for SPARQL. It can deal also with JSON.

No, it doesn't, it is agnostic. There's an adapter for every major database out there. Oh, yeah, graphql also has momentum and strong adoption, unlike SPARQL.

Oh yeah, GraphQL is backed by Facebook (may that be a hint of its momentum, like its support for React?) , unlike SPARQL which is a _standard_. You can also convert from PostgreSQL, MySQL, DB/2 and others to SPARQL. Still, only difference seems 1. Facebook pushing its non-standardized tech around and 2. Losing any benefits from HATEOAS from the usage of GraphQL.

Sure but I use GraphQL as middleware when fetching from elasticsearch, or redis, or flat files. It is not something you hook up directly to your database, it's a way to help define an api for your application.

Most of the time, in my app, resource names do not even correspond to single tables or backend data structures but are simply presented that way for ease of use for external consumers.

Subjectively, Implementing it feels more like old school COBRA than REST or SQL.

GraphQL has no demands on your data model. You can do whatever you want behind the schema you provide to client apps

I think you should read it directly from the website: "GraphQL is a query language for your API, and a server-side runtime for executing queries by using a type system you define for your data." You need a type system to bypass the datamodel. Just pushing the issue around.

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