Member-only story
Why Do We Need GraphQL?
And how can it speed up our apps
The days of an internet consisting of static web pages are long gone. The internet faces a sheer mass of end devices, and all these devices have the same interest in loading data as quickly as possible.
We need high-performance applications and a good and constantly improving infrastructure to achieve this.
Additionally, fast applications make users happy and bring more money to the providers.
The history of the internet and the future of the internet has always been and will always be about delivering fast data from the server to the client. And GraphQL could be involved in this.
What is GraphQL?
"GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data" (https://graphql.org/).
GraphQL is transport-independent but is usually provided over HTTP. The nice thing about GraphQL is the fact that the only data that is needed can be requested.
Traditionally, data has been consumed through REST (Representational State Transfer) APIs. It is common to provision and deliver complete entities in the REST process. And there arises precisely the problem, which GraphQL tries to solve.