Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
After years of development, GraphQL is set to reign as the go-to API for data fetching. But what is GraphQL? Simply put, it’s a query language that allows you to fetch data from any server, and it’s a noteworthy alternative to the likes of other web service development styles like representational state transfer (REST) and simple object access protocol (SOAP). There are a few reasons why GraphQL will dominate the DevOps world, including its overall efficiency, ability to work with any server and overall ease of use.
Understanding GraphQL
GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling queries with existing data. GraphQL provides a complete and digestible description of the data in an API, gives clients the power to ask for exactly what they need, makes it easier to evolve APIs over time and enables powerful developer tools.
Top Benefits of GraphQL
GraphQL addresses many pain points that often slow down developers, who prioritize adaptability and working quickly and efficiently when building applications.
For one, it is much more flexible than other data query languages, allowing users to specify exactly what data they want and in which format. Other data query languages require users to retrieve all data in a specific format, regardless of whether they actually need the data. That excess, unnecessary intake can cause delays and confusion.
GraphQL’s ease of use is also invaluable, thanks to its simple and intuitive syntax. The language is strongly typed, which means developers can catch errors early on in the development process before code goes into production. This can save much-needed time and money in the long run.
Another benefit is that it can be used to fetch data from multiple sources because it uses a schema that defines the different types of data available. This means if a developer has a field in a schema that could potentially return data from multiple sources, they can specify which source to fetch the data from. Developers don’t get this benefit from other data query languages, which often allow data fetching from only a single source.
Advantages for DevOps Teams Over Other Data Query Languages
As the world of software development continues maturing, so do the tools and technologies DevOps teams use to build and operate their applications.
REST and SOAP are popular web service technologies, but they come with some major drawbacks. Notably, both REST and SOAP rely heavily on URL structures and verbose XML payloads, which makes it difficult to evolve the API without breaking existing clients. And because each endpoint is a unique URL, providing a consistent experience across different parts of the API can be challenging. REST and SOAP are also quite chatty and can make it hard to optimize performance.
In contrast to REST, GraphQL provides a single endpoint for all data requests and is much faster than making many HTTP requests. GraphQL’s declarative query language specifies precisely the data needed – no more, no less – increasing bandwidth and improving performance. Applications can run faster and use fewer resources, which is especially important for mobile apps that need to be lightweight and fast.
Understanding the data is crucial for DevOps teams, and GraphQL allows developers to visualize data in a graph. Teams can see the relationships between different points more easily, leading to better-informed decisions about the best ways to manipulate the data.
The increased efficiency when conducting API calls is also a plus with GraphQL, which helps teams retrieve all information they need with a single API call. Traditional REST APIs often require multiple API calls, mainly because each resource in a REST API is represented by its own unique URL, along with its own set of permissions and data that needs to be retrieved. GraphQL can eliminate this bottleneck.
Overall, dealing with complexity is significantly reduced when developers use GraphQL. When using traditional REST APIs, writing a lot of code to handle different edge cases and error conditions is the norm. But GraphQL streamlines this – much of the complexity can be handled by the server itself, making way for simpler and more maintainable codebases. DevOps teams are also able to decouple their front-end and back-end development efforts by using a schema-based approach. GraphQL enables frontend and backend components to be developed separately without worrying about breaking changes, which means faster development cycles and fewer errors.
The amount of data that organizations need to understand, organize and query will only increase in the coming years. DevOps teams can get ahead of the ongoing data and information onslaught by taking advantage of GraphQL and its unmatched ability to provide an efficient, powerful and flexible API for data fetching and manipulation.
