Woow! Honesty this they BEST talk on REST vs Graphql. I like how The conclusions of the speaker are based on objective criteria and very well understood concepts and standards.
That's so strange, because I thought almost completely the opposite. It seems he presented his opinions as facts, and then drew conclusions from them as if they were facts.
Your REST pros and cons don't seem to align with any of the experience we have had in the last 10 years of building REST APIs. I'm not sure where you get that there is a high learning curve. You can build a REST API in spring framework with a handful of lines of code. I like GraphQL but this comparison seems very biased and slanted.
@Mike Dunn I think you talking about "so-called REST APIs" 19:56 If you create REST API and follow all its rules, then things might get trickier. For a starter: REST API must be uniform. It must follow HTTP rules (right headers, right status codes, etc.). Have layered architecture. Rarely companies follows all the rules, because they want to make things happen quick. You can take "REST API" and ask yourself a question "why it's not a real REST". Most likely you will find a bunch of things that are not following REST architecture.
Why choose between Rest and GraphQL? I mean both can live next to each other and you can take advantage of both, depending on what you want to expose. More or less: data -> graphql, all the rest -> rest
Thank you very much for this, Zdenek! Really helpful all the categories you present and how the different technical solutions match those categories. I definitely liked it and helped me understand a lot of concepts. Please, keep sharing :)
I am interested in learning GraphQL, knowing its advantage. But when I started to read its documentation, my motivation decreased, and turned to look at good articles on REST API and found one. I don't know. However, my goal is to have skill on both techs, knowing which areas each tech fits best. Btw the speaker, Zdenek Nemec is a good guy; he answered my question for suggestions via email. :)
Not sure if the guy ever heard of OpenAPI standard... it solves large chunk of the complains he has about REST APIs, while most of the other issues he had were fundamentally sourced in lack of communication, poor project management, lack of architecture, he was lucky not to stumble upon similar issues with GraphQL, always new girlfriend is more sexy one, but you can screw up GraphQL just like you can screw up REST. Not to mention that some of the issues he has are also an advantages if you have someone with architect mindset in your team. REST is like a PC, GraphQL is like a next shiny console (with SOAP being one of the older generations of a console) - sure, there's plenty of shit on PCs, and it's easy to build one that doesn't work, but at the end of the day - it still holds the upper hand.
I'm dissapointed that the gRPC and protobuf were completely ignored here. Especially when talking about performance. Also, I don't agree with some of the disadvantages of GraphQL and advantages of REST. For example - I think that application-level caching is more significant than network level caching. You have to know what to cache and for how long - and this knowledge belongs to application, not the infrastructure. Also, some of the presented advantages (like paging and the whole HATEOAS) of REST APIs are not guaranteed by openapi/swagger specification and therefore can be subject of bikeshedding in same way as in GraphQL APIs.
He is only advociting for REST, because with GraphQL he would loose its Job;-) GraphQL solves almost all Problems of REST and makes APIs so much easier and better. I spent a lot if time comparing REST versus GraphQL. GraphQL is in almost all cases the better choice. 1.) REST only wins in having multiple Representations (that 90% of the users do not need) 2.) REST can have a slightly better performance (due to parsing overhad of GraphQL) 3.) in REST caching can be easier. (But I hardly know any API that uses standard Internet-Caches, what he talks about). Caching is so complex, you normally do inside the server and then it is the same for GraphQL and REST. 4.) And yes, you have to do your homework with GraphQL to write query optimized Resolvers (N+1 Problem). But this is solvable. All the other cases he talks about you can have a completly oppositie view and stuff you can easily do with GraphQL, much better. It's like my dad defending that the music of the Beatles is the best music ever...
Can someone explain to me how is GraphQL different than a regular graph database? How is this suppose to be better then a good fast graph database you probably won't be able to make it run faster than the database so why?
@@h0ph1p13 Well no GraphQL is to graph database what odata is to sql. Sure you could make odata work with anything but once you get into advance stuff you actually need you really can't make it work. This just one more needles abstraction for 99% of applications.
