| A couple thoughts here. First off, what are the advantages of regex queries here? One of the major advantages of GraphQL alongside libraries like Relay or Apollo is that there are strict, easy to understand data requirements that are tightly coupled to view logic. I know my server API, why would I want something like this? Especially in considering the regex keys incur a non-trivial performance penalty. This page comes across misleading or disingenuous at worst: 1. "JrGQL" is listed as a non "new language" even though GraphQL's spec was published before it came out, and has been in use at Facebook since 2012. I'd imagine this is because jrGQL uses JSON. It still requires parsing on top of JSON. I don't know why the author thinks this counts as a non-new language. 2. All of the jrGQL "features" listed in green and almost all of the competitors in red or yellow? The page does nothing to claim why strict typing is a bad thing. 3. jrGQL is touted as more readable without any explanation as to why. I personally find it way more unreadable, as graphQL comes across largely intuitive to query even without knowledge of it (building performant gql servers is another story). For example, can author really claim that something like: ``` {
"// JSON RegExp Graph Query Language": "",
"name": "jrGQL",
"?[filter]": "",
"search?": ".values$"
} // is more readable than:
query GetAllTheThingsQuery {
people(name: "GQL", search: "Smith", first: 5) {
name
}
}
``` |
I see now that regex may be an overkill, the main intent was to support keys that are not predefined. It is easy to imagine a data set where a lot of keys can exist with the same prefix: { "text-decoration": "underline", "text-decoration-color": "red", "text-align": "center" } For this situation it may be useful to query all the keys with prefix "text-", without exactly knowing what are the possible keys. Since document databases and JavaScript are popular, we should open up the strict typing. Clients may have the right to store arbitrary metadata on their objects. In GraphQL you have this option, just add a metadata key as string and you can dump anything there, but this way you lose the option to filter on this. That exact missing feature inspired jrGQL.
1. Yes, it is not a new language, since it is always a valid JSON. This is useful since every validator, syntax highlighter already knows it. GraphQL created a new language just because they not considered to reuse an existing one. You can say that jrGQL still needs parsing on top of JSON, but every query should be validated on the server side and that needs parsing too. Also we can call regex evaluation as parsing, but this is just a more by a substring() call than simple equality check to filter the result set.
2. Coloring is definitely a mistake, I'll fix it. I did not want to say that others are bad in anything. Man, those are production ready quality and this thing is just a concept with only a reference implementation. I just wanted to show where jrGQL is different from others.
3. This is about tastes, I should add that for me it is more readable. I don't like GetAllTheThingsQuery stuff, since it is defined by an other party, if you need that it is an other endpoint and you get what you were meant to get, but no control. With jrGQL you always get what you requested, so it is not WYSIWYG, but WYRIWYG.