Hi, co-founder of Graphcool here. It's very exciting to see AWS adopting GraphQL as a part of their offering. GraphQL in combination with serverless functions is a great fit to build applications quickly and shines in the use case described by AppSync.<p>P.S. We'll soon release a few example of how to use AppSync together with Graphcool (which works really well together!)
Amazon is amazing at creating scaleable and reliable services, but their UX and the way they announce new products is awful.<p>There's room for startups to wrap these services into something more usable. There are already good examples: netlify, graph.cool, dashbird and others.
This AWS announcement is quite exciting. For those wondering what else is available, I can share some recent research into available graphQL backend systems (but I have not used them past demo yet).<p>These 3 hosted solutions all have a similar feature set. That includes support for enum types, uniqueness, required, and relations<p><pre><code> * GraphCMS
* Scaphold
* Graphcool
</code></pre>
GraphCMS is probably the most user friendly around schema creation, but that may not matter to you if you are an app developer. If you just want to declare a GraphQL schema there is Graph Front.<p>There are also open source GraphQL backends<p><pre><code> * https://github.com/jscomplete/graphfront (Postgres)
* https://github.com/postgraphql/postgraphql (Postgres)
* http://join-monster.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
* https://rest-layer.io/ (MongoDB, Sqlite3, Google DataStore)
</code></pre>
You can also now run Graphcool on your own infrastructure.<p>As a disclaimer, GraphQL was not designed to not be mapped to a data store like this. However, these technologies are at least a great way to prototype a backend.
AWS AppSync tech lead here. If you'd like to request access, please go to <a href="https://pages.awscloud.com/awsappsyncpreview.html" rel="nofollow">https://pages.awscloud.com/awsappsyncpreview.html</a>
If you want to have a look at the console, they showed a demo on the twitch stream
<a href="https://www.twitch.tv/videos/205044748?t=01h21m05s" rel="nofollow">https://www.twitch.tv/videos/205044748?t=01h21m05s</a>
Seems promising. I'd be interested to know how this compares to something like RethinkDB for "realtime" (awful word we've settled on to describe changefeeds and such) apps.
Hey! Co-Founder of GraphCMS here. Super excited to see that more and more tech giants see the huge value in GraphQL. This is a great day for the community.
I am also a huge fan of the Graphcool service and I definitely see great integration potential here. Looking forward to the next weeks! Well done, AppSync team!
Want something similar without the lock in? The community has recently added GraphQL query capabilities (including realtime updates, like Firebase!) to gun, fully Open Source: <a href="https://github.com/brysgo/graphql-gun" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/brysgo/graphql-gun</a> (note, I'm the author of gun, but not the GraphQL extension)
This is actually something I thought it should be good to be service and it is great Amazon decided to make it. I didn't look into details, so hopefully it can be used without big issues. Really cool.
Interesting so the data is actually stored in a datasource like DynamoDB and this is a managed GraphQL service that you can use to handle auth, mapping, subscriptions etc
Very timely product from Amazon. AppSync comes with subscriptions and looks quite useful. Do any of the other GraphQL startups out there offer subscriptions?
CoFounder and CEO of Tipe here. I think AppSync is amazing. Using GraphQL with AWS services is simple. This is a no-brainer for Enterprise. We're using some of this tech to offer enterprise support for our customers. Check us out and signup for beta, <a href="https://tipe.io" rel="nofollow">https://tipe.io</a>
Will AppSync also enable offline-first mobile apps?<p>For example enable users to use the app without the need to transfer data to AWS (create/modify data without an internet connection on the first app start). And only connect to AWS if the user wants to sign in to backup/sync the app data with AWS.
The AWS AppSync pages are live now: <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/appsync/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/appsync/</a>
A bit confusing that there's blue, underlined text that look a lot like links.<p>Perhaps this was posted too early and should actually link to more in-depth docs?
Graph.cool has been great for me, and good customer service.<p>That said, and I'll just say it... GraphQL as a standard is total garbage. What was wrong with existing transport formats (JSON)? Why must I now learn YET ANOTHER query language and schema definition format, much less one with the frailty of a toothpick house with no glue?