Memphis PHP User Group

GraphQL and Your Laravel Application

In web development the frontend landscape is an ever evolving cacophony of code. It can be difficult to determine which new trends are worth adopting and supporting with backend code. GraphQL is certainly the “new hotness” but is it worth the effort to add it to your existing Laravel application?

This talk will cover:
The code required for GraphQL to work with your existing Eloquent models.
The tradeoffs you should consider before implementing GraphQL.

There are multiple open source Laravel packages that make the implementation of GraphQL easy, and GraphQL can be added to existing Laravel applications without touching any existing code. With great power comes great responsibility. GraphQL is an application layer transfer protocol, and choosing to use GraphQL will impact the fundamental structure of your application. Projects using modern JavaScript frameworks (Vue, React, etc.) can greatly benefit from the self-documentation, request granularity, and data manipulation potential that GraphQL offers. After covering the implementation, we’ll look at how I reached the decision to adopt GraphQL in recent Laravel project.