44. GraphQL's Benefits and Costs

Owen Ou, an engineer at Heroku, is joined by Tanmai Gopal, the CEO of Hasura. They start their conversation by describing what GraphQL is, and what problems it set out to solve. GraphQL focuses on making data fetching easier, whether that client is a web browser or an API call. GraphQL provides one endpoint that can query all your application's domain logic. If your primary consumer of data is a front end application, then GraphQL is likely a good choice to use.

The conversation continues with help on how to get started using GraphQL, and situations where GraphQL might not be useful. For example, if your data is not in JSON, or is in a binary format, it might not be a good fit. As well, depending on whether your application is a monolith or a set of microservices, how GraphQL incorporated varies, and can be difficult. Tanmai continues with his team's experience of incorporating GraphQL, the challenges they faced, and the improvements they noticed.

Tanmai and Owen conclude by looking to the future of GraphQL. The language is very solid, but the spec is continuing to evolve with community feedback.

Links from this episode

• graphql.org is where you can learn all about GraphQL
• Awesome GraphQL provides a list of GraphQL tools
• learn.hasura.io offers GraphQL tutorials