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by adamscybot 1937 days ago
If you're a front end developer the advantages a clear because of much superior tooling. The reason for this the agreed SDL spec format which is part and parcel of GQL. REST is just a loose collection of ideas and OpenAPI is not integral to REST as theres no single over arching spec of organisation for REST.

In my experence therefore, the tooing (code gen, doc gen) etc around OpenAPI is piss poor in comparison to gql. Just look at GraphIQL compared to postman.
2 comments
gengstrand 1937 days ago
The above referenced PoC service based on express uses https://github.com/apigee-127/swagger-tools which surfaces a web app by which front end devs navigate through the published API endpoints. They can use the web app to call the service via the endpoint or copy and paste sample code that calls the service. Most open api integrations support this kind of functionality.
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simiones 1937 days ago
From my experience, front-end developers are the last people that want to learn how to query a complex data model. It's usually much preferable if the backend team exposes the required endpoints for any UI operation, since they have much more fine-grained control on the DB and a much clearer intuition on what is easy to do and what isn't.
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