What is GraphQL?

The field of technology and communication is one sector which never witnesses stagnancy. This is because the human brilliance is always at its best to make the best use of technology to invent, reinvent, and introduce latest tools, computing languages, and software in the market. GraphQL has been introduced by Facebook in 2012. It is a query language which has been introduced to fetch data and manipulate between the server and the client.

It was the year 2015 which witnessed the public release of GraphQL. It is known to offer an alternative to REST (Representational State Transfer). This is primarily because GraphQL provides a new meaning and way to define the APIs. Data from GraphQL can be enquired by the clients as queries. Before this transformation, REST was the only one tool which occurred in the mind of the people who wanted to define the APIs. To define the requests and the responses, the strong query language is in vogue. It is a more structured and systematic approach as compared to REST. Even web developers agree with the statement and make use of the tool.

It came forth as a solution by Facebook for transferring the data between devices and databases and came to be known as GraphQL. It is far more efficient to retrieve the data from GraphQL because while using REST the data is hardcore. The USP of GraphQL is that it is not language specific and the clients and server can communicate easily if they happen to speak the same language which is GraphQL.

Why is GraphQL Useful?

1. It is very helpful for the platform where the clients want flexible response. Big data transformation can be avoided and thus the management can be optimum.
2. Without any change in the backend, the client side developer can be changed.
3. The platform uses schema which is used to organize the data in the format of query and response. It has its own system of typed queries which is highly useful to return the data in the specific format.
4. It offers a simplified approach to the loading of the relational data. An example will make the point clear. A blog post gets reviews and comments. Now these comments are related only to the specific blog post. The post and the comments can be retrieved using the single network request using the internet. In REST, it is a two-way process. Thus the time consumption is high and so is the performance.
5. GraphQL allows the web developers to use the specific piece of information required. Lengthy and unimportant data is not interpreted thus making the platform very accessible and flexible.

Winding It Up

The next-gen interface has become very popular and the professionals can easily earn to implement the same in their respective organisation so that growth and flexibility becomes synonym with them and their company. Facebook has the GraphQL server written in Java script but open-source implementations are available for other popular languages like C#, Ruby, Python, Java, and Scala. Web developers can make the best use of the query language.

Learn how to create back-end of a Mobile app with its own GraphQL endpoint.