[schrockn]

Hi I'm Nick Schrock and I actually came up with the name. Graph in this context means social graph or more generally the conceptual graph of data in your application, which you can query. It doesn't mean that it is a formalized graph database in any sort of way, nor does it seek to be.

I understand the name causes a bit of confusion but the ship has kind of sailed on this one :-) I think people will get used to it if/when it becomes a widely known name.

[lobster_johnson]

Ironically, the "query language" part also misses the mark, and I think that part confuses people more (as in that RethinkDB discussion).

GraphQL is closer to what we call a protocol; it has minimal syntax, a kind of data model, and it can only be used for declaring requests. You can't implement anything in GraphQL: absolutely all of its expressions are implementation-provided — contrast with, say, SQL, which, being an actual query language, defines operators, arithmetic expressions, mutations, etc. A defining quality of a protocol is that it's a medium through which clients can talk to multiple black-box implementations, which is exactly what GraphQL is.

I like GraphQL, but I wish you'd thought through the name before you started to publish about it. If you'd called it something like Extensible API Protocol, nobody would have batted an eyelid.

[phpnode]

I'm sure you're right because you have the power of facebook behind you but yeah the name is problematic. I agree with lobster_johnson in that it's not a "query language" either, it's more like an analogue of JSON.

Virtually every graph database vendor now gets requests that they implement GraphQL, because from the name it sounds like it fits but in reality it's totally unrelated.