Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jaegerpicker 1949 days ago
As a Mobile Dev/Frontend Dev GraphQL is a massive win to work with. No more requesting/building end points to satisfy the screen you are building. Adding fields is non-destructive. Controlling the shape of the data returned (to an extent, you still have to return it in the nested layers the schema is designed towards). I know a ton of backend or full stack devs that don't think that GraphQL is worth it but very FEW UI devs that agree. It's really nice to build UI's against. I've tried SOAP, REST, HATEOAS, Swagger/OpenAPI, and protobuffers. Protobuffers are the only one with as good a developer experience IMO. GraphQL is OBJECTIVELY useful it might not be useful to you apps though and that's ok.
1 comments

Objectively was probably the wrong word, maybe "generally" would be more accurate. I was looking to contrast GraphQL with something like REST which is an incredibly powerful generic mental model, where GraphQL seems more specifically tuned to solve front end developer's issues.