Articles
WTF is Apollo Federation
Read moreApollo Federation is an open source architecture that is designed to help your organization implement and orchestrate GraphQL services at scale. That's a sentence with a lot of words, but why do we care? Why is it useful? In this article, we'll take a closer look at the Whys and the WTFs of Apollo Federation.
Free Public GraphQL APIs
Read moreOne of the most genius things that the creators of GraphQL ever did was give us GraphiQL. GraphiQL is an in-browser tool that you can use to send queries to a GraphQL API. To start working with GraphQL, you don't have to build a server. You don't have to write a parser. You don't have to set up a client solution. Instead, you can just start sending queries.
Creating a Content Hub with GraphQL
Read moreMany of the most common misconceptions about GraphQL have to do with the whereabouts of data. It's often thought of as a database. It's often thought of as a replacement to REST. It's often associated with a certain type of database.
Incorporating REST Data with a GraphQL API
Read moreOne popular misconception about GraphQL is that you have to tear down all of your REST APIs in order to build a GraphQL server. The flexibility of GraphQL allows you to use all of your favorite REST data sources while enjoying the organizational benefits of a GraphQL schema. In this article, we'll take a closer look at how we can incorporate the data from a REST API into an existing GraphQL server.
Securing Your GraphQL Server
Read moreWhen you build a GraphQL API, you provide a lot of freedom and flexibility to your clients. They have the flexibility to query data from multiple sources in a single request. They also have the ability to request large amounts of related, or connected, data in a single request. Left unchecked, your clients could have the capability of requesting too much from your service. Not only will the strain of large queries affect server performance, it could also take your service down entirely. Some clients might do this unintentionally, whereas other clients might have more malicious intent. Either way, you need to put some safeguards in place and monitor your server’s performance in order to protect against large or malicious queries.
Creating Custom Scalars
Read moreGraphQL fields can return lists and objects, but of course, they can also return singular values. These are called scalar types. A scalar in computer science represents a single variable, an atomic unit that can hold one value at a time. A lot of data for our apps falls into the scalar category: names, email addresses, phone numbers. These are leaves of the tree: lone values instead of objects.
Ready to Scale: Refactoring GraphQL Schemas
Read moreA GraphQL schema is a tool for communication across teams. When we work together to define a schema with the schema definition language, we're deciding how everyone using our API will consume the data. We want to make it as clear and simple as possible for consumers to send operations to our API without errors.