With the ever-changing technology landscape, you might have doubts about adopting GraphQL API for your backend and be unsure how it can improve your current data needs. However, regardless of what language or architecture you are using, GraphQL API can help simplify data access, supercharge the product development process, improve application performance, and handle complex backend data scenarios.

1. One endpoint for your backed:

One advantage of GraphQL API is that it provides a single unified endpoint for your backend to meet both client and general API use cases. A single GraphQL API can handle all the client’s requests and forward them to the correct backend service.

As companies and their products scale, REST endpoints can become large and incredibly hard to manage. One of the main problems in REST is the N+1 problem, where the client calls the server N+1 times to get N number of resources, mainly because a single REST resource does not provide enough information for the client to operate with.

GraphQL API hides the complexity of the underlying backend system by aggregating the required data from different sources and providing a simple interface that clients can communicate with through a single resource.

2. Improved Performace:

GraphQL API improves application performance by reducing JSON payload size and network overhead from multiple API calls. By allowing the client to specify its data requirements, GraphQL APIs eliminate the need for unnecessary generic data being passed from the backend and minimize the number of roundtrips required to retrieve backend data.

As companies scale and iterate their products, the data required by different clients and pages changes. In REST API design, when new requirements arise, developers must decide whether to create a new endpoint and have clients make a new request for that data or add more data to an existing endpoint. The first option leads to more server roundtrips, and the second option increases payload size, both of which can hinder app performance.

Companies like Netflix have reported faster page load times and overall app performance after switching to GraphQL APIs.

3. Improved Reliability:

GraphQL API improves system reliability by ensuring that client queries are valid and in sync with the GraphQL schema specification before query execution. GraphQL uses a type system that describes what type of data can be queried from the backend server and in what form it exists. A strongly-typed schema offers enhanced security over REST APIs by preventing breaches like SQL injection and unintentional data leaks, resulting in a more secure and reliable application. Type-safety ensures that any breaking changes by the backend server would be caught by clients consuming the data, resulting in less downtime. With GraphQL APIs, you can modify and deprecate API fields while still maintaining backward compatibility. It is easier to know which fields in the API are being used by what clients and which ones are not. With GraphQL, API developers can confidently make changes to the existing APIs without breaking the existing functionality.

Ultimately, GraphQL ensures API consistency, reliability, and security, which results in better system performance.

4. Better Experience:

Adopting GraphQL APIs improves the developer experience for both frontend and backend developers. Backend developers want to build APIs that are intuitive and easy to explore and navigate. GraphQL helps with that by reducing the time spent documenting APIs.

GraphQL APIs allow clients to query the schema and discover the resources available on it. With excellent tools and libraries like the GraphiQL IDE, the interactivity for GraphQL API endpoints is much more intuitive for the developer.

API consumers want APIs that are flexible, easy to integrate and support a variety of client use cases (Web, iOS, and Android). Because of REST's inflexibility, it is challenging to create a single endpoint that can meet all of the client’s data requirements. Often the same client has to call multiple APIs to get the data it needs from the backend. Additionally, with REST APIs, frontend developers have to rely on the backend for API specifications before building product features, leading to slower development time.

GraphQL API hides the complexity of the underlying backend system by aggregating the required data from different sources and providing a simple interface that clients can communicate with through a single resource.

Links:

Hasura- gives you instant GraphQL & REST APIs on new & existing data sources Hasura -- Introduction