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Comment by zachrip | Hacker News Reader

I think REST is definitely playing catch up here though. A standard gql setup generally comes out of the box with type generation, web playgrounds, etc. Of course it's possible now with REST but I really think that gql helped push the state of the art in this space.

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huh! Swagger playground is there at least one year before[1] gql was used internally in Facebook and several years before it was available publicly..

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swagger_(software) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GraphQL

We’ve had these aspects out of the box with oData REST endpoints that have been in production for half a decade.

What do you think may account for the lack of take up iof oData?

I'd say mostly lack of knowledge about it, but sometimes people who are aware it exists don't like the fact that it allows arbitary queries, they think that only implementing specific methods provides more security - which can be achieved by limiting the odata access in any case, so that comes back to lack of knowledge.

Another factor may be that Microsoft used it so some sectors thought it was uncool and spent a long time building other stuff instead ..

I honestly can't say. It's quite easy to use and broadly supported. Even excel can directly pull data from oData Sources with a couple of clicks. If anyone else has some insights into the lack of uptake of oData I would love to hear them though.

We get that out of the box w boring old django/sqlize

we do happen to do more interesting things elsewhere (GPGPU, columnar streaming analytics, reactive frontend, ...), so like sharp edges when a 10X+ lift, but ended up backing up on this layer as it was adding complexity w immature layers vs what felt like similar perceived benefits from reliable boring stuff. it doesn't scratch all our itches, but the big ones are at a layer above/beyond graphql vs rest (eg, auth)

Where do you use the boring pieces in your stack? Mostly around CRUD management of metadata?

basically!

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