Video: How to Use Suspense and GraphQL with Apollo to Build Great User Experiences

Apollo Client uses React's Start Transition feature to mark updates as low priority. This allows the application to maintain the existing UI while new data is fetched in the background, improving the user experience during interactions like infinite scrolling or loading additional data.

Apollo Client's new suspense feature, released in version 3.8, integrates with React 18 Suspense to manage and coordinate transitions in applications smoothly. It provides a more seamless user experience by handling UI states during data fetching more effectively.

Using React Suspense with Apollo Client helps in reducing unnecessary loading states and coordinating UI transitions smoothly. It improves the overall user experience by minimizing the jarring effects of data fetching and rendering in a web application.

Implementing suspense support in a data fetching library is complex because it involves intricate management of loading states, error handling, and UI transitions. This complexity arises from the need to seamlessly integrate these elements while maintaining performance and user experience.

Use Suspense Query is a hook introduced in Apollo Client 3.8 that replaces the traditional useQuery hook for fetching data. It is designed to work with React 18 Suspense and does not manage loading states directly within components, instead relying on React Suspense boundaries to handle loading UIs.

The defer directive in GraphQL allows parts of a query to be fetched and rendered asynchronously. This improves performance by allowing initial parts of the UI to load without waiting for slower parts of the data fetch, thus reducing perceived load times and improving user experience.

Apollo Client's suspense feature handles transitions by using React 18's support for suspense and transitions. This allows developers to define suspense boundaries in their applications that manage how components wait for data and transition new views into the UI.