“the main thing your frontend devs like about GraphQL is its self documenting type safe nature”
I’ve been saying this for years: fetching multiple things in one query is not something normal-scale apps care about. What devs like about it is client generation and type safety. So OpenAPI, for all its flaws, covers that. GraphQL’s schema language is much more beautiful — hopefully Microsoft’s TypeSpec will take off and we can have the best of both worlds.
Another point implicit in the piece but not quite stated is that GraphQL aims to make something nice for the API consumer, but the implementation side is a nightmare. It is not worth the tradeoff because eventually, that nightmare leaks out to the consumer because it is too hard to make improvements to the API.
I’ve been saying this for years: fetching multiple things in one query is not something normal-scale apps care about. What devs like about it is client generation and type safety. So OpenAPI, for all its flaws, covers that. GraphQL’s schema language is much more beautiful — hopefully Microsoft’s TypeSpec will take off and we can have the best of both worlds.
https://typespec.io/
Another point implicit in the piece but not quite stated is that GraphQL aims to make something nice for the API consumer, but the implementation side is a nightmare. It is not worth the tradeoff because eventually, that nightmare leaks out to the consumer because it is too hard to make improvements to the API.