[brblck]

This definitely enables a lot of opportunity to do both smarter querying and smarter caching on the back-end.

While you can indeed perform larger, more complex requests, GraphQL by nature forces queries to explicitly ask for everything you want to get back. As a result, we're not wasting any capacity giving you back a bunch of data for an entire object that you don't need like we would in a normal REST API request.

The thing that I'm most excited about with all this is the fact that we're building new GitHub features internally on GraphQL as well. This means that unlike a traditional REST API, there will no longer be any lag time between features in GitHub and the GitHub API.

API is a first-class product now. API consumers get features as soon as everyone else!

Please make sure to give us feedback during this alpha stage! https://platform.github.community/

[postila]

There is a lot of cases when user needs just 20 rows from billions but getting them is very hard problem. One of such examples is well-known: it's twitter-like data model, where a user can "follow" thousands of others and you need to fetch top N recent posts from all that thousands streams.

In Postgres, straightforward approach to query such data is based on JOINs and it's absolutely inefficient. This can be dramatically optimized with recursive CTEs, arrays and loose index scan approach, but GraphQL by default it will do straightforward JOINs, right?

I hope GraphQL has (or will have soon) ways to overwrite/redefine queries, but again, it leads us to the same problems "patch driven development" that everyone hated in ORMs during decades. That's why I'm saying that GraphQL is "a new ORM", but it's more dangerous due to it's openness and proximity to web users, that's why it can bring even more dev and devops pain to the world that ORMs did during decades.

[k__]

Is it available client-side ?(CORS/OAuth/etc)