Modern frameworks come and go. Some of them manage to become a new standard. With a rise of modern JavaScript libraries like [React](https://react.dev/), new approaches to data fetching like GraphQL APIs are becoming more popular. While [Node.js](https://nodejs.org/en) is still being the most popular technology for [GraphQL](https://graphql.org/) based backend, there are many other options.

If Python is your preferred choice you would be very keen to hear that Django has decent support for [GraphQL](https://graphqleditor.com/). Being more specific [Graphene](https://graphene-python.org/), a product with a goal to ease developers lives by providing a library for building GraphQL APIs. Before we move on let's take a look at how it all has started.

#### The need for a new approach

In the early 2010s, the IT industry had to face a new challenge. The significant rise of mobile usage shown weaknesses of architecture many big social services where data structures take the form of graphs. The significant increase of mobile usage led to many performances some issues with low-powered devices and sloppy networks and the development teams discovered that REST isn’t optimal to deal with this kind of issue.

***"Adapt or die"***

Identifying this as a crucial part of mobile app performance, Facebook started working on a solution to meet their newsfeed's data management requirements, which was later on open-sourced under a name GraphQL.  In parallel, a couple of other companies identified the same problem with their data fetching model. Many of them abandoned their projects after GraphQL was made publicly available and decided to adopt this great tech. Unlike others, Netflix continued to work on their own REST alternative [Falcor](https://github.com/Netflix/falcor), which they decided to open-sourced as well.

#### What's a GraphQL

GraphQL is a query language for APIs. It’s becoming more popular because, unlike to REST, it offers smarter & a lot more elastic data fetching.

Let's take s look at simple GraphQL query:

```ts
query {
  user {
    name
  }
}
```

and a server response it would return:

```ts
{
  "user": {
    "name": "Tomek Poniatowicz",
   }
}
```

Now imagine that you are fetching data for a Facebook feed, where you have a user, posts of that user's friends, comments for those posts made by other users, etc. There is a lot of data that need to be requested, which may lead to over/under-fetching problems in REST. Since GraphQL gives power to the client to fetch the needed data only, nothing slows down, as it's very simple to just add a new field to a query.

#### Django integration for Graphene

We need to install `graphene-django` library and include it in our `settings.py` file

```ts
pip install "graphene-django>=2.0"
```

![](https://graphqleditorcms.fra1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/graphqleditorcms/media/1.webp)

and set up a GraphQL endpoint in Django app

![](https://graphqleditorcms.fra1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/graphqleditorcms/media/2.webp)

Now let's prepare a simple Django data model in our `app/models.py` file
and define our schema in `app/schema.py`:

![](https://graphqleditorcms.fra1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/graphqleditorcms/media/3.webp)
and

![](https://graphqleditorcms.fra1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/graphqleditorcms/media/4.webp)

and we are all set. Now you can query your simple schema:

![](https://graphqleditorcms.fra1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/graphqleditorcms/media/5.webp)

#### The main benefits of using GraphQL

There’s a lot of hype on GraphQL and debate on [GraphQL vs REST](https://graphqleditor.com/blog/graphql-vs-rest-performance/).
The main benefit of using GraphQL is the fact that it's way more elastic in terms of fetching data than REST, which results in fewer round-trips to the server. GraphQL makes problems of under & over-fetching disappear.
As GraphQL is in an early stage of adoption, it has some weaknesses (i.e caching), but it's gaining a lot of momentum & becoming a force to reckon.

Getting started with GraphQL in Python

Ready for take-off?

Unlocking the Power of React 19

Welcome to a short post about a recent quality of life update to GraphQL Zeus. If you're not familiar with GraphQL Zeus go ahead and read my [earlier post which breaks down its basics](/what-is-graphql-zeus). If you are lets go ahead and talk about the update!

### Graphql Fragments

GraphQL has long supported reusable fields natively with the use of fragments. If you're not familiar with them basically if you had the same fields in multiple queries you could define a fragment - a set of fields, and then reuse it instead of repeating all the fields every time. Lets say you had a user with some fields like name, email, address. Then you could use a fragment like this:

```ts
query getUser {
  user(id: 4) {
    ...userFields
  }
}

fragment userFields on User {
  name,
  email,
  address,
  avatar
}
```

For reusability you could put all your fragments in a fragments.js file and then use them across a project. Zeus already had a solution like Selectors (which work a bit similarly to that) but with the latest update it can now go a step further! :)

### Zeus fields - GraphQL spread operator

For our example lets say we need to get the posts data for our blog page where we display them in a grid, usually the query that would look something like this:

```ts
const posts = await Chain('http://example.com/api/graphql')('query')({
  posts: [
    {
      title: true,
      coverImage: true,
      publishedAt: true,
      slug: true,
      content: { markdown: true },
    },
  ],
});
```

With Zeus 6.0.0 you can simply use a spread operator `...fields` with the TypeScript type from the schema (eg. `Post`) to simply get all the fields available for that type:

```ts
const posts = await Chain('http://example.com/api/graphql')('query')({
  posts: [
    {
      ...fields('Post'),
    },
  ],
});
```

### Never go full REST

With this, we now have a convenient quality-of-life improvement for cases where you just want to quickly retrieve all the fields for a type. That said it's important to remember what GraphQL is all about - getting exactly what you requested without overfetching. So don't just use `...fields` everywhere or you'll defeat the entire purpose of using GraphQL in the first place and turn it into REST, always pulling way more data than necessary.


Zeus update - GraphQL spread operator

GraphQL Zeus is codegen which, with the use of just one command, generates Typescript types for your GraphQL schema. From there even a junior frontend dev can easily handle writing type-safe requests to the backend, and do so without asking backend devs or even looking at the schema. To showcase how easy it is lets go over the installation and some basic use cases.

### Installation and example query

1. Obviously first we need to install it in our project using `npm i graphql-zeus`.
2. Once it finishes installing we need to point it to our schema url using the command `zeus http://example.com/your-schema-url/`. Zeus will then generate types for everything in that schema and put that in a file in its folder so that you can easily import it across your project.

### Queries

Now we can begin writing type safe requests. Lets say our example will be a simple query which fetches reviews which we then put into a table, list, carousel or whatever else on our website:

```ts
const reviews = await Chain('http://example.com/your-schema-url/')('query')({
  listReviews: [
    {
      author_name: true,
      rating: true,
      content: true,
    },
  ],
});
```

That will give us all the reviews as an array, we can then easily map over it to create some simple component like this:

```ts
{
  reviews.map((review, idx) => {
    return (
      <div key={idx} className="flex flex-col">
        <h3>{review.author_name}</h3>
        <div>{'★'.repeat(review.rating)}</div>
        <p>{review.content}</p>
      </div>
    );
  });
}
```

Queries follow a simple structure: we use square brackets for their contents and then:

- in the first curly brackets we put the query payload ie. what we're sending to the backend (for example the id of the item we want to get, the locale or the access token for a login query)
- in the second curly brackets we specify which fields we want to receive

Following our example lets say we're interested in getting our reviews in only one language - then we would have to specify that in the query payload(autocomplete is your friend here and will tell you exactly what you can input there):

```ts
const reviews = await Chain('http://example.com/your-schema-url/')('query')({
  listReview: [
    { locale: 'pl' },
    {
      author_name: true,
      rating: true,
      content: true,
    },
  ],
});
```

### Mutations

With mutations instead of retrieving data, we're sending it to the backend to make changes. The structure is the same as with queries, two sets of curly brackets:

- in the first brackets one we include the inputs ie. what we want to change (like add a new review or modify an existing one by id)
- in the second brackets we specify what we want to get back after the mutation runs, which is usually a confirmation that the mutation was successful

Sticking with our previous example we can create a mutation to submit reviews:

```ts
const newReview = await Chain('http://example.com/your-schema-url/')(
  'mutation',
)({
  createReview: [
    { input: { author_name: 'John', rating: 5, content: 'Great product!' } },
    {
      id: true,
    },
  ],
});
```

This will only create a 5 star review by John with that content. Most likely you'd want to link that to some small form component which lets users write reviews and sends that mutation with the data on submit or something similar.

### Use with CMS (Hygraph)

If we're reusing queries or mutations across our project it makes little sense to keep writing them out like that. It makes more sense to put them in a specific file and then import them as needed. For this example lets say we're pulling data from a CMS like Hygraph, we can create a file called `requests.ts`. Then at the top of it we can create a custom Chain which will handle the url and authorization (we'll be using it for all our queries and mutations since Hygraph wont let us through otherwise):

```ts
export const chain = Chain(process.env.CMS_URL!, {
  headers: {
    Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.CMS_TOKEN}`,
  },
});
```

Now we can create a query to get all our blogposts from the CMS and even limit those to only the ones in English and only those in the Published stage o that we avoid getting drafts and such:

```ts
export const getPosts = async () => {
  return await chain('query')({
    posts: [
      {
        stage: Stage.PUBLISHED,
        locales: [Locale.en],
      },
      {
        title: true,
        author: true,
        coverImage: true,
        publishedAt: true,
        slug: true,
        content: { markdown: true },
      },
    ],
  });
};
```

From here using it in our component is a simple as doing a const and then putting the data in a map, list, carousel or whatever we want.

```ts
const blogposts = await getPosts();
{
  blogposts.map((blogpost, idx) => {
    return <BlogCard key={idx} />;
  });
}
```

GraphQL's core concept is getting only what you request without overfetching so if we want to get just one blogpost we'll need a specific query for that. Lets say we want to make dynamic pages for our blogposts using slugs, for that we'll need to pass that to the CMS in the payload and then we'll receive only the post we asked for. We also need to throw an error in case an incorrect slug was provided or something else went wrong, so lets use a simple try catch:

```ts
const getPostBySlug = async ({ slug }: { slug: string }) => {
  try {
    const result = await Chain('query')({
      post: [
        {
          stage: Stage.PUBLISHED,
          locales: [Locale.en],
          where: { slug: slug },
        },
        {
          title: true,
          author: true,
          coverImage: true,
          publishedAt: true,
          slug: true,
          content: { markdown: true },
        },
      ],
    });
    return result;
  } catch (error) {
    console.error('Could not get post, error:', error);
    throw error;
  }
};
```

### Zeus Selectors

Writing out all the fields we want returned every single time would be cumbersome, and that's where Selectors come in. Since Zeus generates types for the entire schema it makes writing Selectors much easier with the use of autocomplete and type-safety. As we were querying for blogposts it makes the most sense to go with a Post Selector as an example:

```ts
export const postSelector = Selector('Post')({
  title: true,
  author: true,
  coverImage: true,
  publishedAt: true,
  slug: true,
  content: { markdown: true },
});
```

Thanks to that instead of writing out all the fields we can just use a selector like this:

```ts
export const getPosts = async () => {
  return await chain('query')({
    posts: [
      {
        stage: Stage.PUBLISHED,
        locales: [Locale.en],
      },
      postSelector,
    ],
  });
};
```

And that's all for the basic use cases, hopefully this guide was simple enough to follow and now you're ready to use Zeus for your projects and find out yourself how handy it is for working with the backend. I can say it definitely worked wonders for me as a very junior frontend dev. If you have any questions or want to know more, feel free to reach out and stay tuned for the next post, where I’ll dive into a recent update to Zeus and how it can make things even easier!


Getting started with GraphQL in Python

The need for a new approach

What's a GraphQL

Django integration for Graphene

The main benefits of using GraphQL

Check out our other blogposts

Ready for take-off?

Elevate your work with our editor that combines world-class visual graph, documentation and API console