How about caching? It feels like GraphQL tries to win some (arguable) flexibility in putting together clients and in the process throws out most of the operational advantages of resource-based APIs with significant disadvantages in both how to put together a backend.
Is it elegant? No.
Do you have another service to manage? Yes
Will you pay someone else to do it for you? Possibly
I think there are already products trying to do that. But how many layers of abstractions and dependencies are you willing to have in your everyday processes?
It does a lot of client-side caching for you. The documentation is atrocious though IMO. I'm not sure if there exists a similar framework for backend caching.
Relay is a GraphQL client. That's the irrelevant side of caching, because that can be trivially implemented by an intern, specially given GraphQL's official copout of caching based on primary keys [1], and doesn't have any meaningful impact on the client's resources.
The relevant side of caching is server-side caching: the bits of your system that allow it to fulfill results while skipping the expensive bits, like having to hit the database. This is what really matters both in terms of operational costs and performance, and this is what GraphQL fails to deliver.
Take a look at this. Either you didn't know what's challenging about caching nested graph data, or we have different definitions of triviality/interns.
I repeat: client-side caching is not a problem, even with GraphQL.
The technical problems regarding GraphQL's blockers to caching lies in server-side caching.
For server-side caching, the only answer that GraphQL offers is to use primary keys, hand-wave a lot, and hope that your GraphQL implementation did some sort of optimization to handle that corner case by caching results.
Don't take my word for it. It's really that bad.
Does it, though? It seems it really doesn't, nor was GraphQL designed with HTTP caching in mind.
The only references to caching in GraphQL are vague hand-waiving arguments about how theoretically GraphQL implementations might be implemented with some sort of support for caching primary keys.
But any type of HTTP caching is automatically excluded from GrahQL.
To put it differently, is there any third-party caching solution for GraphQL? As far as I could gather, the answer is no.
Oh so one of the most basic feature of any API, one which has a direct impact on scalability and motivates entire product lines and businesses like CDNs, is now "unnecessary"?
> you can just cache GraphQL like REST,
Go ahead and show one example, please.
I'm not sure you understand the problem at all.
Are you actually able to show an example or not? Because changing the HTTP verb doesn't magically change the problem, and passing query parameters as a request document renders these queries uncacheable.
> You can use Apache, nginx, squid, any proxying webserver worth its salt...
Great, pick the one you're familiar with, and just show the code. Well, unless you're not "worth its salt" or are completely oblivious to the problem domain.
Note that I made a very primitive implementation. Depending on which GraphQL node is queried, the request will be cached by the proxy or not. Apollo GraphQL server has much more fine grained methods of allowing caching (see https://www.apollographql.com/docs/apollo-server/performance...) however I left the example code crude so you see exactly what's going on under the hood.
Sorry, that doesn't cut it at all. Far from it. Being able to cache a response is not the same thing as optimizing queries that hit your database. Being able to cache a response means not having to hit your database to begin with, and save up on things like traffic going into your database, and round trip time.
With REST APIs I can get a web service to return responses that are HTTP cacheable, put a nginx instance between the ingress controller and the web service, and serve responses to REST clients without even touching the web service that provides the REST API. I can even deploy nginx instances in separate regions.
What's GraphQL's response to this basic usecase?