[schrockn]

Hi I'm Nick Schrock one of the GraphQL developers at Facebook.

While GraphQL certainly shares some attributes with OData, we believe it is substantially different enough from Data that we aren't simply repeating the same mistakes.

There are a number of differences, but two in particular are striking.

1) Is that the GraphQL language is built with product developers in mind. This is a subjective/qualitative judgement, but we believe that it's just a much more elegant language, and that it is a more powerful platform for tool-building. We hope to prove this out in the coming months as both we and the community build tooling atop the language and the introspection system. 2) GraphQL is more constrained. A OData service has to support a huge number of operations that make it more of a generic querying service, rather than a highly structured way to expose application logic. We agree with you that often cover too much and without adequate performance guarantees.

In terms of complexity on the server side, I think this is a really legitimate question. Our answer is that although there is complexity, it is generally incurred on a much smaller set of core and tool developers. The average product developer who will just need to expose a capability via a GraphQL type and then consume it on the client will not find the system overly complex.

[skrebbel]

A bit late so you might not read this, but I really like your response and it's going to make me take a deeper look at GraphQL. Thanks for the writeup!