Why Developers Like GraphQL?

Have you heard of GraphQL and wondering if it would be a good fit for your next project? In this post, we are going to understand what GraphQL is, and its benefits.

Introduction to GraphQL

If you are new to GraphQL, here is the long story short. GraphQL is the new specification that you can use for your API. It is an alternative to writing APIs using REST.

It was developed by Facebook as an internal solution for their mobile apps, and was later open sourced to the community. Ever since then, it has been widely popular among developers and has become a favorite solution for building services.

GraphQL is a query language and is agnostic of the language you use. It is just a specification. The client can query for the data they need from the server. And the server responds back with a JSON response to the query. The interesting thing to note here is that, the client can ask for exactly what they need, and they receive only that. Yes!

Why GraphQL?

Before picking any technology, we need to understand the reason behind choosing it. Let’s dive right it and understand why GraphQL can fit your development needs.

1. Superior Developer Experience

The biggest benefit of using GraphQL, is the superior developer experience that it provides in comparison to alternatives like REST. An interesting thing to note is that with GraphQL, frontend developers stand to benefit a ton. The client driven approach provides a lot of power to the clients to query for what they like by creating custom queries.

No versioning of APIs

This may come as a surprise to some developers. GraphQL has introduced developers to a whole new era in API design and development. Since the client only asks for the data that it needs, it has made API design using GraphQL very flexible. There is no versioning…