Panel Discussion: GraphQL for non-JS Languages

Hi everyone. It's good to see you all. I'm really excited to have this panel discussion. I think it's a very interesting subject and I think this discussion actually could continue not only here but in general more. I hope we all can learn from each other. This discussion is about Basically GraphQL in languages that are not JavaScript. So I'll be talking least and as little as possible and give everyone here the stage to actually talk about their expertise and their languages and how GraphQL fits into their languages as well because the whole point of GraphQL is that it's language agnostic and can connect actually between different languages and different ecosystems.

So I think that this panel has at least the potential to be very interesting and very productive and very cool and all my fellow panelists here are amazing people. So I hope it will be great. We'll do a short introduction for each person. Each person can talk about the language of their choice or languages of their choice and what they do in the day-to-day, and then we'll just start talking and chatting. I'll start very briefly. I'm Ulriam, a member of a group called The Guild, and we work mostly around JavaScript, TypeScript, and Rust. So I'll shut up most of the time. And I'll hand it over to the rest of the group.

Starting with Gabriel. Hey everyone. My name is Gabriel, and I'm from Sweden. I work at Arizon, which is an IT consultancy and startup incubator here in Stockholm, Sweden. I maintain an open source library called Rescript Relay, which is connecting Facebook's GraphQL client Relay, together with Rescript, which is a programming language. So I'm kind of cheating here, because my programming language compiles to JavaScript, so I guess I'm halfway member of the panel. I also run an online meetup for Relay, which is called Relaymeetup.com. And yeah, that's pretty much all for me, I'd say. Thanks, Gabriel. Alex, and then I'll shut up between the introductions, you can just go one by one. Yeah. Hi, my name is Alexander Fawak, I'm Lead Frontend Engineer at OpenSocial. We build a community experience platform, and we're currently in the process of adding GraphQL to our existing products that is built with PHP and Drupal. And one of the things that, yeah, I've spent a lot of time working on has been building our real-time chat, which was, yeah, trying to make PHP do real-time subscriptions was quite an interesting challenge. I bet.

That's it. Yeah. Over to Marcin. Hey, hi, everyone. My name is Marcin Gambala, and I'm from Wroclaw in Poland. So I am a Lead Backend Developer at Sailor Commerce, and Sailor is basically a headless e-commerce platform. So I've been using Python for eight years now, and GraphQL for five years. So most of my career with Python, I've been actually using it with GraphQL. We use Django primarily with Graphene Framework, so I can talk a little bit about that. Yeah, I think that's it.

Hey, everyone. So my name is Jeremy. I am a huge Rust fan. So I've been using quite a lot of languages ranging from, I don't know, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript and all this stuff. And I've contributed quite a bit to open source mainly in Rust-lang. And I got a chance to join Apollo GraphQL a couple of months ago to work on the Rust router, which is super exciting. I can't wait to share more.

Hey, there. I'm Robert Massalgo. I'm a Ruby on Rails developer and the maintainer of GraphQL Ruby. And gosh, I live in Virginia in the day-to-day. I have three young daughters, and I like to ferment things. That's it for me. Hey, I'm Ellen. I am a mobile developer advocate at Apollo GraphQL. I also worked on the iOS SDK for quite a while. I am going to be talking about Swift and Kotlin. And yeah, I live in Madison, Wisconsin. And yeah, this guy behind me is George Michael.

And yeah, this guy behind me is George Michael. This is great. I mean, there's so much knowledge here, I think. Also different languages and ecosystems with also both client and server, and like different languages and ecosystem on the server and different language and ecosystem on the client. There's a lot to talk about.

Now, I know that usually, especially on Twitter, like starting a discussion about why your language is best is the worst thing to do. But I think here at least in the spirit of learning and everything, I think what I want to maybe make the first question would be, and we can go all around everyone here. What do you think is, let's say, unique about the language you are using and what do you think are the advantages that you get from this language when using GraphQL compared to other languages? And maybe even not compared to other languages, just why do you think there's something special there? Because then everyone else can learn from it.

So I don't know, maybe we'll start with Jeremy. Yeah, sure. Wow, that's a good question. I think the main advantages of Rust would be, like it's described in the motto, it's hack without fear. I am super happy to have a language that actually helps me to write sound code. And by that, I mean once it compiles, it runs and then it runs pretty well. And it's super fast, and I have a compiler that really has my back, right?

On the other hand, the learning curve is quite steep at first. So for quite a while, until a couple of months, maybe six months ago or something, I would hack most of my stuff, maybe in JavaScript or using another language where I could just get stuff done. And once I actually understand exactly what I'm trying to do, I would rewrite it eventually. So yeah I would say it really shines once you know kind of what you're doing and where you're trying to go, but I would probably not use it as the first language in my kit to be honest.