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Comment by barumi | Hacker News Reader

> I see GraphQL and other tools created by FAANG companies being used all the time by 1-3 person teams.

GraphQL is touted as a technology which saves developer time by avoiding the need to develop REST APIs, and instead just expose your database to the world and let your frontend just get whatever data it needs.

No wonder you're seeing small teams using it. It's not because of FANG, not because of cargo cult development, not because of incompetente. It's because small front-end teams don't spend their scarce resources on areas where return of investment is limited.

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> GraphQL is touted as a technology which saves developer time by avoiding the need to develop REST APIs, and instead just expose your database to the world and let your frontend just get whatever data it needs.

Where are you seeing this? There are a couple of solutions that follow this model (e.g. Hasura, Postgraphile), but it's not an approach recommended by any of the creators of GraphQL, or the bulk of its users.

I’m the maintainer of PostGraphile and I also don’t approve of “just expose your database to the world and let your frontend just get whatever data it needs.” PostGraphile is a tool to help you to rapidly build performant and secure GraphQL APIs that follow many of the GraphQL best practices out of the box. It is not a “run and done” solution, you do have to put a little effort in to build a decent API but we give you the tools to achieve this in a fraction of the time of rolling your own, and probably with better performance also. Our extensive documentation is peppered with advice on how to craft your API, not to expose more than you need, not to expose complex filters (instead adding specific filters the frontend needs), how to include/exclude things, how to add in additional fields, types, remote content, etc. Our users are generally very happy, we’re just not very good at marketing ;)

> Where are you seeing this?

Why, for starters right on GraphQL's own slogan? In the fact that GraphQL is sold as the API layer for front-end applications?

"Faster frontend development"?

"Iterate quickly on apps without waiting for new backend endpoints"?

These are direct quotes from GraphQL's front page.

You need to be completely disconnected from the topic to not be aware of GraphQL and it's value proposition.

> instead just expose your database to the world

This is the part I was focusing on, sorry if there was confusion. For context, I've been working with GraphQL since June 2015, so I'm pretty intimate with the topic.

It's worth noting that those slogans you quoted are from graphql.com rather than graphql.org. The latter is the official site, the former (.com) is owned by Apollo and isn't official in any capacity -- something I personally find to be an extremely questionable situation. GraphQL's actual slogan is "A query language for your API".

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