I don't think necessarily GraphQL is hard to understand as a concept. It's just difficult to figure out how to use it in an actual app context. How do I handle more complicated things such as authentication and, more importantly, what are acceptable and secure ways to structure your queries for auth (and things like that). I can certainly hack around with `context`, I just don't know what is actually good or not.
This is really cool! I think that for the demo you should make the "Explorer" open by default - I bet most people won't realize what to do otherwise and will be intimidated (and just leave).<p>If possible it would be good to add default values too (like the "ticker" in the stock data set)!
I’m a big fan of graphql and use it for all frontend work.<p>I ran into one issue recently from a server side client use case where I needed to quickly consume an entire endpoint. Since you need to define each field in your query, it was more time consuming to create the requests. I also see the issue if fields are added, you would miss that data without updating your query.<p>Typically these are benefits when doing frontend work, to limit data, but I did find it annoying when just needing to quickly dump data.<p>For my own servers moving forward, I’m going to be adding a _doc json field for users that need traditional rest endpoint functionality in a query.
Naive question: Is GraphQL meant to be used only by the frontend developers to consume backend data, etc? And not by the actual consumers of the API (ie customers, users)? If not, I don't see why consumers would ever want to use GraphQL.<p>Figuring out the syntax/language to do something as simple as retrieving the first X items requires more thought than calling a dead-simple REST endpoint.
I've been a OneGraph user for a while now and I have to say the Explorer feature is still one of my favourite things about it.<p>In my opinion, a well designed API <i>should</i> be as easy to explore as folders on a computer, and the GraphiQL Explorer makes this the case by default.