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Software Development: Facebook’s GraphQL Offers an Alternative to REST APIs

By Dick Weisinger

Web APIs are evolving.  REST has become the standard for building web-based APIs, replacing earlier technologies like SOAP.  REST proved itself to be lightweight and flexible.

There’s an alternative to REST that is becoming more popular: GraphQL.  GraphQL is the API system created by Facebook.  It is strongly typed and has the advantage over REST in that it allows the developer much greater control about exactly what data it needs.  It also is good at aggregating data from multiple sources. As a result, GraphQL tends to be more efficient and structured relative to REST.

The GraphQL documentation describes the API system as follows: “GraphQL is a query language for your API, and a server-side runtime for executing queries by using a type system you define for your data. GraphQL isn’t tied to any specific database or storage engine and is instead backed by your existing code and data.”

 Sid Sijbrandij, GitLab founder and CEO, said that “we’re going GraphQL, we’re replacing everything with GraphQL.”

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