GraphQL vs Rest API

Article by Karthikeyan

RESTful: (stands for Representational State Transfer, REST for short) At this point in time, is the most common choice among most devs. By virtue, they’re easy to implement, they’re stateless, and they return JSON data (although you could use XML as well).

GraphQL: On the other hand, is a query language that Facebook developed to make it easier for their mobile apps to query large amounts of data without making endless requests to the backend. It’s a potent and different approach from the RESTful way.

The core difference between GraphQL and REST APIs is that GraphQL is a specification, a query language, while REST is an architectural concept for network-based software.

REST has had limitations like multiple network requests and overfetching data. To overcome these, Facebook developed GraphQL as an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs.

One of the most common limitations of REST out-of-the-box is that of overfetching and underfetching. This happens because the only way for a client to download data is by hitting endpoints that return fixed data sets.

Overfetching means getting more information than you need. With GraphQL, you can “have it your way” by describing exactly how you want

GraphQL can be organized in terms of a schema, whereas REST can be arranged in terms of endpoints. It uses metadata for query validation, whereas REST does not have machine-readable metadata cacheable.


Stateless

REST APIs are stateless, meaning that calls can be made independently of one another, and each call contains all of the data necessary to complete itself successfully.

Instead, each call has the necessary data in itself, such as the API key, access token, user ID, etc. This also helps increase the API’s reliability by having all of the data necessary to make the call, instead of relying on a series of calls with server state to create an object, which may result in partial fails.


Apollo Server and GraphQL

Apollo Server is a popular open source implementation of the GraphQL spec. Using the Apollo platform you can build, query, and manage your data graph by connecting to data sources or external APIs.

The platform consists of a JavaScript GraphQL server where you can define your schema and resolver functions. It also consists of a JavaScript Apollo client component that can be used with React, Angular, or Vue frameworks. There is also support for iOS and Android client components.

The Apollo client has features that can directly update the UI components when query results arrive or change and declaratively define the queries from the UI components.

Conclusion:

Organizations around the world are questioning their API technology choices and they are trying to find out if migrating from REST to GraphQL is best for their needs.

GraphQL is a perfect fit when you need to expose complex data representations, and when clients might need only a subset of the data, or they regularly perform nested queries to get the data they need.

As with programming languages, there is no single winner, it all depends on your needs.

You can mix and match REST and GraphQL depending on your needs, and sometimes it’s the best thing to do.