[lukeramsden]

It all seems very interesting, I may try and experiment putting it in front of my current prod GraphQL schema and making a few queries, once I get the auth stuff figured out. One question though, is any of this going to be open source? The on-prem-first focus you have is certainly a selling point for me as I already run my entire backend in Amazon's ECS so adding another service for the wundergraph would be very simple - however, I'm always weary of using non-open source software that I can't fork and patch, as I've had to do that many a time due to not being able to wait for patches to be upstreamed. Regardless, I think the points you make in your blog posts are spot on, and I'm looking forward to watching this project evolve.

[jensneuse]

We'll open source all of it except the control plane and a component we're currently working on which lets you share, stitch and combine APIs of any type across teams and organizations. All the other parts will be open source, the engine, the WunderNode, CodeGen. We don't want to be locked into a vendor ourselves. You can always not use our proprietary services. The core functionality described above will always work offline without using any of our cloud services. We will offer a dirt cheap cloud service where we run WunderNodes on the edge for you but if, for any reason, you don't want to use this you're free to host your own Nodes. I'd love if you could contact me and we have a chat about your use case. I'd really like to get your take and build out the next steps as close to user expectations as it can get. I don't want to build something that doesn't work for the community.

[lukeramsden]

What I can't quite glean from the docs is how you can do row-based security, ie authZ on user ownership of a row when you're trying to filter by certain things other than the ID.

Another thing is mutations - does WunderGraph support mutations at all yet? Security for those is also even more important, as you might want to restrict what entities you can attach to the entity you're creating etc.

I guess the root of my question is how much business logic can you achieve with WunderGraph itself? It's probably not something that's necessary if I really think about it, if it just handles the authN and then passes tokens with claims nad user IDs to the data sources, Hasura/Postgraphile et al can handle the row-specific authZ and business logic, and then WunderGraph can just be the BFF for each app client. I'd still definitely use it in that setup, as the generated clients and federation subscriptions would be a marked improvement over Apollo for me.

[jensneuse]

WunderGraph can inject variables or claims into a query. If you want to implement ownership based authorization e.g. with Hasura, Postgraphile, fauna or Dgraph, etc. the value to determine ownership needs to be part of the schema. E.g. a owner field on a type or a permission table/type. Then you supply a owner ID from the claim and that's it. This works because you don't allow this value to be submitted by the client. It always gets injected from a claim in the JWT. This leads to a big advantage over using one of the Auth implementations from said vendors like e.g. Row level security. You decouple Auth from the storage. You can always move to another database and are not stuck with a specific Auth implementation. You could also delegate Auth to a completely different service like open policy agent. If you don't want to use WunderGraph anymore you can re-implement the logic in a Backend for frontend. This way you evade vendor lock in for both database and middleware layer.

Mutations are fully supported. When generating clients all we do is treat mutations like POST requests and queries and subscriptions like GET http2 streams falling back to http1 chunked encoding.

WunderGraph doesn't want to contain business logic. We are the front door, making everything secure and establishing a stable contract between client and server. We mediate between protocols and we map responses so that every party gets data in the format and shape they expect. Other than that, if you want to add custom logic just run a lambda with any of the supported protocols, e.g. GraphQL, REST and in the future gRPC, SOAP, Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc. and we do the mediation. But as were the middleware layer I'd try to not put business logic into this.

That said I'd love to get in touch and discuss how WG can add value for you.