GraphQL for Web and Mobile Apps Made Simple

Hi, my name is Johan. I'm a CEO and co-founder of Enhost. Enhost is a back-end as-a-service platform. And this talk's title is GraphQL for web and mobile apps made simple.

At Enhost, we think that GraphQL should be simple and available for everyone, not only large organizations like Facebook, GitHub, Stripe, and others that are currently using GraphQL. If we take a step back more broadly, we think and believe that building apps should be simple. So let's take a step back and see what are some of the requirements necessary for building an app.

So almost every app has some variation of this that they need. So they need a database to store some information, API to send information back and forth, that's preferably a GraphQL API, authentication to sign in users, storage to upload funny cat pictures, functions to run some custom code. And if it's a web app, you probably need some kind of frontend hosting as well.

What we realized was that everything in this stack is relatively easy, except for the GraphQL API layer. However, lately there's been some innovation happening. And one of those is Hasura. And Hasura is this amazing piece of software. They have a GraphQL engine that sits on top of Postgres. And based on the tables and the columns in your Postgres database, it will automatically generate a GraphQL API for you. It's a really beautiful piece of software, as I said, and it has close to 25,000 stars on GitHub and it's being used by some big industry names. And as I said, it's primarily a GraphQL engine that automatically generates the API for you. It has subscription for real time, but it also has some other interesting stuff like Event Triggers, Cron Jobs. It has a nice web console to manage everything and much more.

So in our effort to make building apps simple, this is kind of our journey for the perfect back end. So we have the database, this is where we use Postgres, GraphQL API, this is where we can use Hasura. Authentication, we have solved by open-sourcing our own server called Hasura Auth that is integrated into Hasura and manages everything related to authentication. Same thing with storage, so we open-sourced something that we called Hasura Storage, that's also very well integrated to Hasura where you can upload any file, basically any object and it's backed by S3, so the files are actually stored in either AWS S3 or Minio. For functions, we can use something like Node.js and Go and this whole stack is 100% open-source, which is also very important for us.

Coming back to our initial title, GraphQL Made Simple, and we try to make it simple by providing a serverless backend for web and mobile apps. We take care of the setup, the configuration and all the infrastructure, so you as a developer can focus on what is important for your app and for your users. You can think of Enno's us doing for the backend what Netlify and Brazel is doing for the frontend. That's like one one-time model of thinking about what we're doing. There has been a lot of innovation in the frontend lately, and we believe that the next wave of innovation is going to happen in the backend. We're a serverless backend, and here are some of the things that we provide. I would say like the top layer here is what is most important about what we provide, so the database, GraphQL API and authentication, but we also have you covered in various other parts of the backend. So as I mentioned, storage functions, we have a CLI for local development, GitHub integration to push your code to GitHub, and we will automatically deploy migrations and metadata and functions for you, event triggers and much more. So now there is really no excuse anymore. GraphQL can be simple and available for everybody. I now encourage everybody here to build apps that are both fun to develop and that users will love. Thanks.