![]() The history of GraphQL at Facebook is quite widely written about and you can look up online and find out all about it. It's been around, open source for about six years now. ![]() Then the spec was first released publicly in 2015. Garrett: GraphQL was originally developed by Facebook in 2012. Why We Have GraphQLīetts: Michelle, why do we have GraphQL? What does it give us? The story of REST is really the story of the web. Some of the reasons that new protocols have emerged has probably been based on its ubiquity and the compromises that come with that, and the ambiguity that comes with that. How are we going to expose systems to the mobile? We can use this REST thing that seems to be working in other places. Then it was, there's these mobile devices. Then it was like, what if we use a REST API to do deployments or do some management over web networks. It used to be you just connect to the eBay API or something, using REST in the early days. I think, people learning it in one area and then applying it another. If we go underneath the browser on webs, how do we just plug things together using web protocols? That's why I think part of the power of REST and part of the ubiquity of REST has been its wide adoption in many different use cases. What if we just use HTTP verbs and define things as resources over the web? If I had to generalize what problem it was meant to solve, it's like the web itself. It started just being like, here's a practical way of doing things. REST's rise was really in response to, in rebellion against this SOAP. At the time, there was a lot of energy behind SOAP in the enterprises, here's a way of using web technologies to connect things, and all these very prescriptive standards about how to write SOAP messages. In terms of solving the problem, I think what's really interesting is, it was a very organic adoption of REST in a lot of different uses. He was more like showing in a thesis, here's how you can define an architectural style, and let's choose how the web works, so we'll use REST. Roy Fielding had the dissertation, which defined the style of Representational State Transfer. It's a great point, you could probably write chair or token size books on the history of REST and APIs. McLarty: I'm only choosing REST, because CORBA was not an option. Matt, you're up first to tell us about REST. Give me the one problem it was trying to solve and what was the innovative idea that it brought to the table. Tell me, why was your technology created? We don't need a whole history. At some point in the past, they did not exist. We're now at a point where with any of the three technologies you represent, someone can come in and just implement that technology right now. For various reasons, this has led to the invention of countless protocols, patterns, and paradigms for developing APIs. APIs have existed for as long as we've needed two systems to be able to talk to each other. I want to start off with brief origin stories. He's not behind a microphone here at QCon, he's behind a microphone as co-host of the 'APIs Unplugged' podcast. Matt McLarty is a Global Field CTO for MuleSoft, co-author of two O'Reilly books on microservice APIs architecture. Twitter picked her up after she did an amazing job implementing GraphQL at Condé Nast, where surprisingly, they did not put the GQ in GraphQL. Michelle Garrett is part of the team building Twitter's large scale GraphQL API. Alex is currently an engineer at Netflix, and was previously at Google, who gave us the g in gRPC. It's just a helpful way to create a discussion with diverse opinions, because we really want to understand, what are the tradeoffs you need to consider when evaluating your options? Background I don't want to paint any of the panelists into a corner as only an expert on one topic. Any good architect knows the only time you should ever use always or never is to say we will never do an absolute. I'm joined by three panelists, each chose to be a representative of one particular API technology, more or less.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |