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Comment by qudat | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree with the idea of catering your BE to service your -- most likely -- single FE client. Every rails project I have worked on has this 1:1 mapping between endpoints and entities and it drives me insane. We set up these APIs to have clean lines between models and endpoints and consequently we push all the complexity of combining all of these related entities onto the FE. Then we wonder why the FE is so complicated! If I have to make 5+ API requests for one page then there was a severe failure in planning the API.

What's even more frustrating is this is the rationale for moving to something like graphQL. We have engineers advocating for it because then it's "just one request per page" and it doesn't click that the framework we are using is pushing us into a less than favorable API design.

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GraphQL is appealing from the frontend perspective, but I've yet to see a case where it would do anything but make the backend 10x harder to develop, and it doesn't solve the problem of the frontend also having to know all of the entity relationships. Since you're using Rails, it's a lot easier to just add a controller endpoint that provides the composite data (as has been mentioned elsewhere already) for one UI action/page/navigation/state change, instead of using an entity-focused API. Controllers are supposed to abstract over potentially multiple models, not just be 1:1 endpoints for each type of entity.

If graphQL makes your backend 10x harder to develop, then you are not doing it right.

The overhead of GraphQL vs Rest on a backend is around 30lines of code in my experience (developed 5 different production Graphql servers, including a very large one). Routes become resolvers, but that’s mostly the only change.

But in the end you get a much nicer API, GraphQL codegen, type safety, auto generated docs, etc...

> Since you're using Rails, it's a lot easier to just add a controller endpoint that provides the composite data (as has been mentioned elsewhere already) for one UI action/page/navigation/state change, instead of using an entity-focused API.

Its possible, sure, but thats not the point. The point is the convention drives people to make entity-based endpoints and thats what I cannot stand. People are running the rails generator to build an entity and then when that doesnt scale we have to reconfigure the API. Overall not a fan of rails and the conventions it promotes.

Overall not a fan of rails and the conventions it promotes.

To each their own. No framework will have the right conventions to see a complex project through 100% with zero customization or deviation. I'm still fond of Rails though I haven't used it in a while. Nothing I've encountered since -- Node, Sprint Boot, Scala+TwitterServer, various Kotlin libs/frameworks -- has been as productive or appealing for me as Rails. You don't know what you've got until it's gone, as they say.

> it doesn't solve the problem of the frontend also having to know all of the entity relationships

isn't this the point of graphql? You can write your front-end with easily generated typed responses.

Hasura with graphql code generator is an amazing, type safe, and secure combo. I've never been able to develop a rest API faster, much less with documentation and type safely.

It might not be faster than rails/html, but it's a hell of a lot easier to reuse, understand, secure, and audit.

I may have misunderstood what you're saying, but binding your endpoints to your entities isn't a bad idea at all. For example, even when you're not making an SPA and are using good ol' server-side generated Rails, you would still have a 1:1 mapping of pages to resources, and your "app" would move you from page to page as you did stuff. This works out pretty well because your resources are what people want to interact with!

Try out Basecamp sometime - watch the routes, they're all well bound to resources, yet it feels very much like an app. The progenitors of Rails are still doing things the old way and they're pretty good at it.

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