Build Better and Discoverable APIs with GraphQL

Building a web Application Programming Interface (API) traditionally involves a significant amount of work: defining routes, writing functions to fetch and shape data, ensuring a consistent interface, documenting the API with tools, and more. The list goes on and on.

GraphQL, an open source alternative framework for fetching data over HTTP, seeks to reduce much of the overhead of building more traditional web APIs. All data from a web service is provided at a single endpoint, and consumers can discover data schemas to then build and run queries to get only the data they need. The result is faster and more efficient development experience in many aspects of building and consuming the data layer.

In this talk at the PDX Node meetup at OSCON 2018, software developer Daniel Lemay gives an introduction to GraphQL and provides demos and resources for getting started with the framework.

You can watch the video below, or on the PDX Node YouTube channel (25 minute watch).