GraphQL - absinthe vs graphql-elixir

Hey there!

Disclaimer: I’m one of the authors of Absinthe. You can find my slides from ElixirConf here, hopefully the talk itself up soon: No REST for the Wicked - Speaker Deck

Absinthe was created about 9 months ago when we really wanted to use GraphQL in production here at http://cargosense.com/. At the time graphql-elixir was still rather young and we had production needs we wanted to move on very quickly.

Our goal was to make something correct, easy to use, idiomatic, and performant. In concrete terms this means we right now:

• Validate your schema at compile time. This catches errors, sets defaults with zero overhead, and ensures maximum performance by baking computed data into functions
• Return extensive error information when queries are executed, helping your clients better use your API.
• Secondary libraries to assist with common client side patterns like Relay Connections
• Easy use of anonymous functions in schemas.

It means in the future:

• We’re reworking execution to be user extensible.
• This new execution model will enable subscriptions and fancy directives like @defer, @live
• Our new execution branch has tests we copied almost verbatim from the reference implementation
• We’re aiming to enable pre-compiled documents for when you want to shave off those last microseconds from a query.

Do you have any specific questions?

We found a version of GraphIQL the other day that made setting headers easy, we hope to add that soon. With that capability it should be easy to set JWT headers or other header based authentication methods.

I’ve used a bit of absinthe, but from what I’ve seen it seems GraphQL is more low level and last I saw it did not have the (graphql-spec-required) documentation paths. Absinthe does more for you and follows the spec better, but you do have to work ‘within’ it more. I ended up choosing Absinthe for a few reasons and of the little area I’ve used it, it was quite nice.

For note, GraphQL is a lot older than Absinthe, Absinthe is quite new and was made to follow the spec as well as it does. If they have the same stars now (they certainly did not when it was new just recently) then that says something about Absinthe as well.