Introduction to GraphQL with Brandon Mathis

Brandon Mathis of Smashing Boxes will be talking about GraphQL at this meetup.

Title: Introduction to GraphQL

Brief: Working with RESTful APIs is not easy! Front-end developers have to stay in tight communication with Back-end developers and constantly ask questions about what RESTful API endpoint should be used to get what data.

How many of you have has a conversations like this?

Frontend Dev: “Can you order the data that comes back from this endpoint by date”

Backend Dev: “No…”

Fronted Dev: “Please!!”

Backend Dev: “Okay”

GraphQL is looking to solve problems like this and create an API standard that scales far better than REST and it’s multi-endpoint architecture. Instead of hitting 3 or 5 endpoints to obtain all the data you need to build a single page, you query a single /graphql endpoint and request exactly the data that you need in the format and order that you want! No more pouring over documentation for artisanal, hand-crafted, farm to table RESTful APIs. Just implement GraphQL on your backend, learn the query language, and that knowledge will be relevant for any GraphQL API you work with in the future!

In this talk, I was go over the basics of GraphQL and detail it’s advantages over REST. I will also walk you through the basics of how to get up and running with GraphQL on Node.js.