[verbin217]

I assume Relay performs the diff-outward-query/patch-inward-data thing. Frankly, that's fucking brilliant. I hope the people at Facebook are extremely pleased with themselves. If I understand correctly then once the number of items shown was less than the initial range of requested items, further refinements wouldn't need to make a second request. Relay could detect from the ids of the first request that it had all the data it needed.

HTTP/2 optimizations could just be layered on top of GraphQL post hoc. GraphQL/Relay is likely better for that purpose than a bag of endpoints. You get all the benefits you've mentioned and extremely bearable unoptimized performance. I guess I just needed to tease the two problems apart in my head.

[underwater]

Yup, and the same optimization can apply to two different queries requesting different fields on a single object, not just ranges.

GraphQL endpoints don't have to return a single JSON object either, you could hypothetically stream back objects as they become available (Netflix's Falcor seems to be heading in this direction too).

[verbin217]

Ah, so it goes the other way too. Sort of like a request inliner/outliner that can perform dynamic optimizations. The client can inline requests using view-state unknown to the server. Then the server can outline them in whatever desirable way to provide an immediate and eventually complete response. That's clever.