This article was originally published at Coder Society, and we’ll explore GraphQL’s core features, how to interact with a GraphQL API, and some development and operational challenges.
Nowadays, REST seems to be the default approach for building APIs, typically based on the familiar HTTP protocol. While REST is relatively simple to work with and enjoys widespread popularity, its use of multiple endpoints to address resources sometimes gets in the way of flexibility.
Since its release in 2015, GraphQL has become the alternative to REST. It gives frontend developers the flexibility they had craved for for so long.
Over are the days of begging backend developers for one-purpose-endpoints. Now a query can define all the data that is needed and request it in one go, cutting latency down considerably.
In 2020, you can’t be a B2B company without having an API program. Whether your API is the product or APIs are leveraged to enable additional integrations and functionality for your web app.
Even though an SDK could seem simple in terms of lines of code, SDKs need to be reliable and handle scale with ease. A poorly designed SDK could cripple your customer’s infrastructure and reduce trust in your service. At Moesif, we put a lot of effort into creating SDKs that are both high performance while adding in fail-safes in case bad things happen. This article walks through some of those practices. Given Moesif is an API analytics service, some of these practices are specific to high-volume data collection. However, other features are applicable regardless of your SDK purpose.
