GraphQL Galaxy 2021

Today's Talk is about adopting GraphQL in an enterprise. It discusses the challenges of using REST APIs and the benefits of GraphQL. The Talk explores different approaches to adopting GraphQL, including coexistence with REST APIs. It emphasizes the power of GraphQL and provides tips for successful adoption. Overall, the Talk highlights the advantages of GraphQL in terms of efficiency, collaboration, and control over APIs.

Enhost provides a simple and accessible GraphQL backend for web and mobile apps. They offer a serverless infrastructure, taking care of setup and configuration, allowing developers to focus on app development. Enhost's stack includes a Postgres database, a Hasura-powered GraphQL API, Hasura Auth for authentication, Hasura Storage for file uploads, and support for functions in Node.js and Go. The backend is 100% open-source and includes features like event triggers, a CLI for local development, and GitHub integration. With Enhost, there are no excuses not to use GraphQL and build apps that users will love.

Envelope is a powerful GraphQL plugin system that simplifies server development and allows for powerful plugin integration. It provides conformity for large corporations with multiple GraphQL servers and can be used with various frameworks. Envelope acts as the Babel of GraphQL, allowing the use of non-spec features. The Guild offers GraphQL Hive, a service similar to Apollo Studio, and encourages collaboration with other frameworks and languages.

Max Stoiber, co-founder of GraphCDN, discusses the challenges faced with RethinkDB and the need for caching in a read-heavy API. He explores how GraphQL clients handle caching and the potential of running a GraphQL client at the edge for faster response times. Authorization and cache key management at the edge are also discussed, along with the benefits of edge-caching and the importance of caching in GraphQL APIs. The audience response reveals that a significant percentage are already caching their APIs, while different use cases for caching and the concept of edge computing are explained.

This talk discusses the life of a GraphQL developer at Yelp, covering tooling, processes, and the scale of GraphQL usage. It emphasizes the importance of making good schema choices and using GraphQL Faker for quick iteration. The talk also highlights the challenges of using data loaders at Yelp and the solutions implemented, such as code generation and precommits. It mentions the significance of schema review, documentation, and GraphQL adoption. Lastly, it mentions the value of obsessive documentation and the use of vPress for generating markdown and an in-house UI for query reference.

This Talk explores the benefits of using GraphQL APIs for data, including representing domain models, addressing API tooling and infrastructure, and supporting interconnected data. It discusses model mapping, read APIs, filtering, sorting, and aggregating data, as well as mutations for invoking logic. The Talk also highlights the importance of standardizing infrastructure and leveraging GraphQL's automatic model mapping and authorization. Additionally, it touches on the use of specialized databases, the comparison between GraphQL and gRPC for data APIs, and the speaker's experience working on various parts of the stack.

The Talk discusses putting the graph in GraphQL with the Neo4j GraphQL Library. It explores building GraphQL APIs backed by a graph database and the comparison between Cypher and GraphQL. The Neo4j GraphQL library provides powerful features such as CRUD functionality, authorization, and pagination. It also covers topics like database integration, hiring for the GraphQL team, and deploying a GraphQL API with the Neo4j GraphQL library.

This Talk explores the performance implications of using GraphQL in a hotel property management system. It discusses optimizing GraphQL API calls, schema design, and caching using Data Loader. The use of automatic persisted queries and caching can improve performance. The impact of response size and pagination in GraphQL queries is also addressed. Additionally, the Talk emphasizes the importance of monitoring and testing queries, as well as improving perceived performance through visual feedback.

WordPress is widely used, and it now supports a REST API for headless usage. Serving static HTML files allows for infinite scaling and surviving viral traffic. GraphQL can be used to interface with WordPress data, reducing complexity. WordPress can be coupled with plugins like Yoast and ACF, and WPGraphQL works seamlessly with these plugins. GraphQL allows for selecting only necessary data and has performance advantages over REST APIs.

Building a scalable GraphQL server can be challenging. There are multiple reasons to build a GraphQL server, such as optimizing client requests and wrapping microservices. The SDL first GraphQL server allows you to write your schema separately from your resolvers, giving you full control. You can create a GraphQL API automatically from a schema, simplifying the process and eliminating the need for manual deployments. The schema can link data sources and third-party APIs, allowing for easy integration and customization.

Neuraligions is a dynamic application security testing scanner designed for developers to test apps, APIs, and ensure trusted security. It seamlessly integrates into pipelines, providing accurate results without false positives. The biggest issue with security scanners is accuracy, and Neuralegion addresses this by automatically validating findings and eliminating false positives. It also provides full visibility of recurring and new issues, along with developer-friendly remediation guidelines. Integrations with common tools and APIs make collaboration seamless and accurate.

GraphQL is an up and coming trend in API development, allowing for the combination of REST endpoints into a single API call. Tyk, an open source API gateway vendor, is now offering full lifecycle API management. With GraphQL, developers can import REST APIs into Tyk and convert them into GraphQL APIs, simplifying the process and reducing the number of API calls required. This lightning talk provides a demonstration of importing IDs, defining data sources, and combining endpoints using GraphQL.

GraphQL can be used beyond HTTP, including scenarios like WebSockets for real-time messaging. It is versatile and can handle background jobs, generate reports, export large amounts of data, and handle webhook payloads. GraphQL's support for WebAssembly allows for executing user-provided code while maintaining security and authorization.

In this lightning talk, the speaker discusses best practices for caching GraphQL APIs. They emphasize the importance of consistent naming and configuration for caching fields. Keeping types consistent and making the cache aware of the schema can improve efficiency. The speaker also suggests splitting queries to optimize caching and reduce server round trips.

Tom Pressenwurter introduces Redwood.js, a full stack app framework for building GraphQL APIs easily and maintainably. He demonstrates a Redwood.js application with a React-based front end and a Node.js API. Redwood.js offers a simplified folder structure and schema for organizing the application. It provides easy data manipulation and CRUD operations through GraphQL functions. Redwood.js allows for easy implementation of new queries and directives, including authentication and limiting access to data. It is a stable and production-ready framework that integrates well with other front-end technologies.

This Talk is about building GraphQL APIs on top of Ethereum and the Ethereum virtual machine. The graph is an indexing protocol for querying blockchain networks like Ethereum and IPFS. Developers can build APIs called subgraphs to efficiently index data and make it available for querying from frontend applications. The graph serves over 1 billion queries per day and is used in various Web3 applications including DeFi, gaming, and NFT marketplaces. The process involves defining the data model using the GraphQL schema and contract addresses, deploying and testing the subgraph, and using a GraphQL client to query the subgraph.

Maxime Beunier, a developer advocate at MongoDB, demonstrates how to build a serverless GraphQL API using MongoDB Atlas and Realm. He creates a new app called Galaxy, links it to the production cluster, and deploys it in Ireland. He then shows how to authenticate users and obtain a token to access the GraphQL API. The demo showcases the ease and speed of building a serverless GraphQL API and provides all the necessary links for further exploration.

This Lightning Talk discusses the setup of GraphQL subscriptions in a Drupal-based product, using Rescript and React on the client-side and the Urql GraphQL client. The choice of ReactPHP over AMP for the subscription service is explained, highlighting the use of Fibers in PHP 8.1 for asynchronous task handling.

Performance monitoring is crucial for businesses as users don't like to wait. The ApolloEngine tool helps track and analyze metrics, revealing response time variances and other information. Instana combines traces for service communication with infrastructure metrics and end user monitoring, implementing open telemetry. Apollo Studio is great for managing the GraphQL schema and provides full observability, enabling efficient root cause analysis.

YugabyteDB is an open-source distributed SQL database that offers horizontal scalability and geo-distribution while maintaining Postgres compatibility. It enables building scalable and always-on GraphQL services by allowing the workload to be scaled through the addition of new nodes and deployment across different regions or clouds. YugabyteDB also supports geo-partitioning and data compliance. It can easily handle increasing GraphQL workloads and can be tried out by downloading the database or using the Yugabyte Cloud platform.

StackHawk is a dynamic application security testing tool that integrates with CI/CD workflows and helps developers quickly understand and fix security issues. It can be used to test running HTTP applications and API endpoints for security bugs, and provides simple descriptions and examples of security issues. The talk demonstrates testing a blog service with StackHawk, which identified critical security vulnerabilities like SQL injection and remote OS command injection. StackHawk allows developers to easily investigate and fix these issues by providing well-formatted requests and allowing for easy replay in the application.

Lenny Burdett discusses Directive-Driven GraphQL, a prototype for building GraphQL APIs. The approach involves adding and removing parts of the schema, and offers advantages over imperative systems. The prototype integrates GraphQL with gRPC, allowing for easy editing and reshaping of the schema. The gRPC DSL and directives determine the behavior of the API. The directive-driven approach also supports Apollo Federation and future work includes support for GraphQL unions and real-time data subscriptions.

This talk discusses the implementation of GraphQL Authentication and Authorization at scale at Unity. The speaker explains how they use GraphQL Federation to expose business functionality through a centralized schema and the challenges they faced in handling auth at scale. They describe how they simplified configuration and scaling using Mercurius and implemented hooks and an Orth plugin. The implementation at Unity involves a Unity Orth endpoint and a central Unity Orth directive definition. The talk also covers the implementation of AuthPolicyHandler and AuthDirective for downstream services and showcases different access levels. The Mercurius Auth plugin provides a scalable approach to authentication and ongoing improvements include adding support for a filter schema.

Today's Talk focuses on GraphQL caching and improving performance using Fastify and Mercurius. The experiment involves federated services, resolver caching, and load testing with AutoCANON. Enabling caching with a 0 second TTL can increase throughput by 4 times. The AsyncCacheDedupe module allows for efficient caching and avoiding unnecessary computations. Redis pipelining has improved requests per second by 100 times. Cache invalidation is an ongoing topic of development.

Today's Talk focused on making GraphQL graphs more usable and approachable. It covered topics such as onboarding developers, enforcing graph usage, handling errors and authentication, creating a custom developer portal, enhancing the log-in button and query IDE experience, enforcing rules, and building and customizing public graphs.

This talk provides an overview of using GraphQL, Apollo, and Next.js together. It covers Next.js' data loading and routing capabilities, code generation with GraphQL, and generating TypeScript types. The talk also explores Apollo Client and its integration with GraphQL code generation. The speaker recommends checking out companion repositories and resources for more information.

Introspection in GraphQL allows APIs to be self-aware and self-discoverable. It eliminates the need for external standards or documentation and provides detailed information about types and fields. The introspection query provides insights into the schema, and GraphQL Tools allows schema transformation. The introspection result can be used for generating powerful tooling and detecting breaking changes in CI/CD pipelines.