Moving the responsibility of combining data to the server is a huge advantage for many organisations. It allows application developers to move much quicker and provides a common data access layer for all applications. It sounds to me like you are over-indexing on the burden placed on the backend developer in your evaluation and not considering the whole picture.
From my experience, the biggest advantage of GraphQL is that having a well defined standard allows the community to build advanced tooling such as https://github.com/graphcool/graphql-playground by Graphcool and all the cool stuff Sashko is talking about in this presentation.
The problem is that on the way you basically reduce your server to the thin layer over DB. Exposing querying API means that you significantly lose control over what, where and how you provide from the server.
We are currently considering using GraphQL in current project and I took a long look at both the standard and library (Absinthe for Elixir). It looks terrible to me. Basically you need to provide yet another layer, supporting mostly generic operations. If your action is more then CRUD, you still need a REST API.
Moreover, you slowly lose control on what can be changed and where, your frontend basically eating logic, but unlikely to be working on it's own.
I understand that it helps when you have records with multiple associations and you want to increase performance and not load everything everywhere, but the cost appears to be huge in terms of maintenance. I totally get why FB is doing it, but it seriously worries me that they market it as an successor to REST, instead of an alternative with such-and-such tradeoffs.
We've used GraphQL in production for about a year now, alongside some legacy rest APIs. It's a lot easier to maintain the GraphQL endpoint, like it's not even close.
GraphQL's secret weapon is the static type definition. We can safely alter fields in the backend, and be notified at compile-time if client-side code is about to break as a result of those changes. We don't have the same guarantees with the rest api, which is the only reason they're still around at all - it's so hard to make changes if you have little idea which client-side code depends on which field.
> We can safely alter fields in the backend, and be notified at compile-time if client-side code is about to break as a result of those changes.
I think that's an immensely useful thing to do - that's why I've been doing it for years by using Thrift instead of REST :). Is there still a value proposition for GraphQL if I'm already using strongly typed interfaces?
Are you talking about a single client and its server? (a.k.a backend-for-frontend). This is not a hard problem to solve when you share a single programming language, with or without graphql.
Because you can't possibly now what your API consumers use on their side.
> Because you can't possibly now what your API consumers use on their side.
Not only do we know exactly what fields the API consumers are using, we also know the types they're expecting. We can make schema refactors fairly safely. That goes a long way towards making the codebase less brittle as a whole
From my experience, the biggest advantage of GraphQL is that having a well defined standard allows the community to build advanced tooling such as https://github.com/graphcool/graphql-playground by Graphcool and all the cool stuff Sashko is talking about in this presentation.