TPDP Episode #20: GraphQL For API Development

I am pleased to announce that the latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast is available for download! If you’ve been keeping up with the blog recently, I’ve published quite a bit of content around GraphQL as I personally believe it to be the future for API development. Being able to access related and unrelated data on demand through a single endpoint is huge for the people consuming your data and huge for the developers creating the data because of specific model definitions.

In this episode titled, GraphQL for API Development, I’m joined by Lee Byron, one of the co-creators of GraphQL at when he worked at Facebook. Lee gives us all the details on how GraphQL came to be, why it is huge for development, and how to use it successfully in your next application.

Protect GraphQL Properties With JWT In A Node.js Application

So you started playing around with GraphQL and Node.js. Did you happen to get up to speed with my previous tutorial titled, Getting Started with GraphQL Development Using Node.js? Regardless on how you’ve jumped into GraphQL, you’re probably at a time where you need to figure out how to protect certain queries or pieces of data from the general public through some kind of permissions or roles.

When building a RESTful API, the common approach to endpoint protection is with JSON web tokens (JWT). In fact, I even wrote a previous tutorial on the subject, but how does that have relevance to GraphQL?

We’re going to take the common JWT approach and apply it towards protecting queries as well as particular pieces of data in a GraphQL API created with Node.js.

Getting Started With GraphQL Development Using Node.js

I’ve been playing around with GraphQL for a little over a month now, just to see if it is worth all the buzz it has been getting when it comes to modern API development. I must say that the more I use it, the more I’m coming to like it.

I recently wrote a few tutorials around getting started with GraphQL using Golang, but being the polyglot that I am, I wanted to see how difficult it would be to accomplish the same in something else, like Node.js. After having made an attempt, I found that it really isn’t any different as it is the same concept, just a different language.

We’re going to see how to get started with developing a web application with Node.js that can be queried with GraphQL rather than the traditional RESTful API endpoint approach.

Maintain Data Relationships Through Resolvers With GraphQL In A Golang Application

I recently wrote about getting started with GraphQL in a Golang application, where I discussed the creation of schemas, executing queries, and mutating data, even though it was all mock data. In this example there were queries for related data, but they were constructed in a very independent form.

We’re going to see how to query for related data, similar to what you’d find in a JOIN operation on a relational database, but using GraphQL and the Go programming language.

Getting Started With GraphQL Using Golang

I’ve been hearing increasing amounts of buzz around GraphQL, a technology that has been around for quite a few years now. In case you’re not familiar, it is a technology for querying API data from a client-front end without having to make numerous requests or receiving unimportant data, both of which may cause negative affects on network latency.

Think of trying to query a relational database. Ideally you write a SQL query for the data you want and you do it in a single request. GraphQL tries to accomplish the same, but from an API consumption level.

We’re going to see how to implement a web application using the Go programming language, but uses GraphQL when working with the data.