What is GraphQL?

GraphQL is a powerful data query and manipulation language for your APIs, and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data. Developed and open-sourced by Facebook in 2015, it has since gained substantial popularity amongst developers, owing to its ability to improve performance, drive efficiency, and boost flexibility.

So, what exactly does GraphQL do? Generally used to load data from a server to a client, GraphQL allows clients to define the structure of the data required, and the same structure in the server's response is returned. This process prevents excessively large amounts of data from being returned, but it ensures that clients get exactly what they need.

Unlike traditional REST APIs, which require loading from multiple URLs, GraphQL APIs get all the data your app needs in a single request. This means clients can choose the types of data that go along with their requests, thus reducing the amount of data being transmitted over the network.

But really what is GraphQL?

In my opinion GraphQL will slowly adopt and will be a must in future. Because if you ask "What is GraphQL?" - the answer is obvious - it is a:

• the contract
• the mandatory layer
• the team communication glue
• the visual state of your system
• the composing framework for your backend
• the layer we lacked for years
• the layer providing type and functionality safety
• the project starter

Concludingly, GraphQL is an innovative approach that provides developers with a more efficient and powerful alternative to REST. It is certainly a technology worth knowing for any modern web developer.

In next sections we will teach you basics and edge cases with graphql