schickling

Hi everyone, co-founder of Graphcool here!

We couldn't be more excited to take this big step forward by open-sourcing the Graphcool Framework. This means you can now:

* Run Graphcool locally (also works offline)

* Deploy a Graphcool cluster to your own servers/cloud

* Get involved in the development of the framework on GitHub

We can't wait to see what you will be building and look forward to your feedback! (Here is a 5 min demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmri5pNR9-Y)

Thanks a lot for your support! :)

We're super excited to open-source the GraphQL Playground today. While working with GraphQL over the past two years, we've continuously tried to improve our development workflows - this is the result.

For those of you who are familiar with GraphiQL, here are some of the biggest additions:

* Works standalone as a multi-platform desktop app (and web)

* Interactive, multi-column API docs (with keyboard support)

* Sharing of your GraphQL queries/endpoints via GraphQL Bin

* Support for real-time subscriptions

* Other features like HTTP headers, VIM mode, tabs, query history & more

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We're looking forward to your feedback and hope you find it useful for your GraphQL workflows! Happy developing! ‍

I couldn't be more excited for the recent license adjustments of Facebook's open-source projects. Great work!

Definitely GraphQL. Github, Shopify, Yelp and many more are now using GraphQL as their primary public API.

Huge thanks to the GitHub team for putting together this webcast!

For everybody interested who already wants to get familiar with GraphQL, check out this getting started tutorial for GraphQL: https://www.howtographql.com/

There is no reason why you shouldn't be able to build one :) You should even be able to reuse the existing Lambda backend.

Hi kensoh, thanks a lot for your great comment.

I totally agree with you! It took years for these tools to mature and so it will be the case for Chromeless. There are probably a range of edge-cases that yet have to be solved but like you said, I'm very optimistic that together with our great community, we'll be able to handle all of these cases.

The big incentive for us to create Chromeless instead of using Nightmare or similar (which I've done for years) was the fact that you can now use headless Chrome (which provides a way more stable foundation) + the ability to execute the code on AWS Lambda which solves the parallelisation question. I hope this makes sense to you :)

As I can't give you an exact estimate when it will arrive, seems like a lot of people are already asking for it here: https://github.com/graphcool/chromeless/issues/5#issuecommen...

Please feel more than welcome to take a stab at it yourself and create a PR for this feature! :)

This should actually be pretty easy. There is no reason that this is bound to AWS Lambda. We're more than open to accept PRs that enable multi-cloud support.

Thanks a lot for bringing this up. We've tried all of the projects listed above before we began to implement Chromeless.

Ultimately it was the combination of using headless Chrome and the ability to execute code in parallel on Lambda, which made us invest in Chromeless.

Chromeless is actually built on top serverless-chrome and was developed together with the author of serverless-chrome :)

Would love to hear how that goes. Please reach out if you have any problems or questions. The easiest way is to ping me on Slack: https://slack.graph.cool

Sounds like a great idea. Would you mind creating an issue here so we can track this? https://github.com/graphcool/chromeless/issues

Nope, welcome to the serverless future! :)

It's of course based on what's more important for you: Running tests non-stop and perfectly utilizing a compute instance vs having the tests executed when you need the results as soon as possible. I might argue that in most cases the latter is what you'd actually want. Especially given that you're getting billed on a millisecond basis.

Thanks a lot. This is fixed now!

Yes exactly + this can run (in parallel) on AWS Lambda, so you don't need to worry about provisioning & running servers. That's actually the part I'm most excited about :)

We haven't done so yet, but it shouldn't be a problem at all to set up Chromeless in a container environment. Would you mind creating an issue here to discuss this further? https://github.com/graphcool/chromeless/issues/new

Sounds like a great service and very useful for frontend developers.

We've built something similar internally and will shortly migrate it to Chromeless. We basically use it to pre-render our websites and docs: https://github.com/graphcool/prep

This sounds very familiar. I'm amazed every time to see what serverless infrastructure can be used for!

I'm really excited to finally open-source Chromeless. We've used NightmareJS and similar tools before to run integration tests but these basically added ~20min to each build. With Chromeless we were able to reduce this time to under a minute!

Here is btw a demo playground to try it out: https://chromeless.netlify.com/

Let me know if you have any questions :)

This seems really interesting! For someone without too much knowledge about blockchain and digital currencies: How does this compare to Bitcoin and Ethereum?

Really cool demo of using GraphQL!

Thank you so much for your support and most important of all, your great work on GraphQL. Without your (and others') great ideas, Graphcool (and many other tools & services) wouldn't exist today.

We've written up a blog post about how we think an architecture combining GraphQL and serverless functions could look like on the backend: https://www.graph.cool/docs/blog/introducing-the-serverless-...

P.S. we're also currently on Product Hunt and appreciate any kind of support :)

Hi primitivesuave! Thank you so much for your kind words!

I'm very happy you're highlighting all these points. It's indeed something we've tried to put a lot of effort into, to make the first getting started experience as nice as possible.

What I'm most excited about is the flexibility and extensibility compared to previous BaaS solutions. This is where GraphQL & serverless functions provide the perfect building blocks without resulting in vendor lock-in.

You're absolutely right, we're already working on an updated version. We'd love to have Apollo's feedback on it to make it as helpful as possible!

Here is a detailed comparison between Apollo and Relay: https://www.graph.cool/docs/tutorials/relay-vs-apollo-iechu0...

(Note: This article hasn't been updated for Relay Modern yet but the main points are still the same.)

For frontend developers who want to get started quickly, you can also use a hosted GraphQL service such as Graphcool: https://www.graph.cool

This approach abstracts all of the implementation details away and lets you focus on your GraphQL schema + implementing your business logic.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of Graphcool. Happy to answer any kind of questions!

Here is a detailed comparison between Apollo and Relay: https://www.graph.cool/docs/tutorials/relay-vs-apollo-iechu0...

(Note: This article hasn't been updated for Relay Modern yet but the main points are still the same.)