Phoenix GraphQL Tutorial with Absinthe

Thanks Ryan! Added to my reading list.

I can’t keep on with the amount of resources people are publishing these days haha, thanks for the post Ryan, definitely looking forward to the rest.

Forget the rest. just keep the graphql =P

It’s still a technology I’m interested in, however I’ve just get into the development of APIs so I don’t see when should I use GraphQL at the moment, but anyway, knowledge is always welcome

GraphQL could be considered a replacement for a REST API (or you could have both). REST API’s aren’t bad but they do have some shortcomings (forces you to make multiple calls to the server, returns more data than you need, etc…). GraphQL improves on some of those shortcomings and IMO makes developing an API significantly easier. It’s important to understand REST as it’s a very common API pattern but I think GraphQL is a better alternative.

So, to answer your question, unless you have a hard requirement for a REST API you could skip it altogether and just build a GraphQL API. It is a complete replacement.

In the rest APIs you get for instance a json response with some data, and then I can consume it with a front-end technology such as Angular, do I need to include extra packages on the front-end to make a request to a GraphQL API? Or it works with standard HTTP?

GraphQL also returns a json response. You will likely want to use a client library to send the GraphQL requests though (similar to how you’d use a HTTP client library). There are a few libraries out there at this point to help make sending requests easier (although it’s easy by itself since you just send a string representing your query). You could use Lokka, Apollo, and others. Lokka is pretty basic and is useful for sending queries. Apollo is more full featured and does caching, etc… Just search for GraphQL clients in whatever frontend tech you use and there’s likely to be quite a few.

Just finished trying it, great tutorial as always Ryan, looking forward for one about authentication

Good stuff!

I went to your blog to check out the meteor/phoenix auth post and realized you just wrote a very similar post! haha guess it doesn’t hurt to have lots of info out there.