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You probably don't need GraphQL
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"GraphQL got a lot of hype because it enabled building typesafe APIs with a better developer experience than any other API"
Haha.
No.
The experience was awful.
Come at me, type-safe bros. Your favorite tech still sucks.
Actually, that's true, across the board. Your favorite technology, it has serious flaws. Frankly, it sucks.
Now get off my lawn.
Unless it's that medicine that prolonged your favorite grandparent's life and quality. That technology is pretty great. But the rest still sucks.
I haven't used GraphQL personally but I've heard interesting things about it. It sounds like you've been burned by it so I'd be interested to hear more about your opinion beyond that you think it sucks if you're willing to share some more details.
Oh, sure.
Primaly, it was needlessly complicated.
I read through a rabbit trail of (unconvincing) documents saying "here's why the way that has worked for decades for you isn't good enough anymore" leading to "and that's why we decided not to implement this quality of life feature you have learned to expect".
It had a "only fit for the truly faithful" cult vibe, last time I checked it, which was about a year ago.
The big thing that turned me off was I did not find ~~a lack of~~ tooling to auto-generate an HTML page that helps explore the API. It seems to me that it would be easier to do so when using strong types, not harder.
Edit 3: I never found: https://docs.github.com/en/graphql/overview/explorer I swear I really did look for it. Pinky promise.
Edit: And since I'm already in brutal honestly mode, the GraphQL docs read, to me, as being by someone who didn't really deeply understand the HTTP specification, or at least couldn't really articulate why they needed a new tool that used less (as far as I could tell from the docs) of that specification, than existing tools.
Betting against hugely popular protocols sometimes, very rarely, pays off. But GraphQL is already well on the way to being forgotten. I don't expect GraphQL to reach a tool maturity level that causes me to ever take a second look.
Edit: For context, I once bet against
git
. So what the hell do I know. We shall see!well, there’s a schema description built into compliant graphql apis and a tool called graphiql that consumes that and provides exactly that api explorer that you’re looking for. many graphql backend frameworks embed graphiql
https://docs.github.com/en/graphql/overview/explorer
Today I learned! Thanks!