An Introduction to GraphQL APIs

Summary
Learn the basics of consuming and building GraphQL. GraphQL is a query language for building APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries. Originally created at Facebook, GraphQL was the internal data-fetching API that powered hundreds of billions of Facebook API calls a day. GraphQL was then open-sourced, specified, and today is a popular choice for building APIs at any scale, with language support across dozens of languages. A large ecosystem surrounds GraphQL, including popular frameworks like Apollo, Gatsby, Relay and products like Hasura. In this introduction, we will learn the "what's" and the "why's" of GraphQL, how to use GraphQL to fetch data, how to design a GraphQL schema, and then finally implement a server to resolve that schema.
Outline
- What is GraphQL?
- How to consume a GraphQL schema
- Design a GraphQL schema
- Implement resolving a GraphQL schema
- Bonus: Combine multiple GraphQL schemas with schema stitching
Prerequisites
- Firm understanding of Javascript, NodeJS/NPM and a good grasp of Promises & Template Literals
- Git & Github account
- Code editor (recommend VSCode)
About your presenter
Tyler Hall is a full stack software developer. He is a Software Engineer at hyper, a company that provides hyper, a meta-service framework, to remove the pain of working with cloud services. Before hyper, Tyler was a Technical Architect at Somo Global, a digital product agency. Tyler enjoys tech such as GraphQL, Deno, and Svelte. Connect with Tyler on LinkedIn.