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GraphQL Resources: top tools, extensions & tutorials for beginners

Tomek Poniatowicz on February 25, 2019

Since the GraphQL was introduced in 2015 by Facebook, it's popularity is continuously growing. If you want to learn the GraphQL here is a list of t...

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Tommy May III • May 26 '19 • Edited

In case anyone is nervous about moving to GraphQL let me tell you I have built many REST APIs for fortune 500 companies and for myself. After using GraphQL these last 6 months I am proud to say I will never build another REST API willingly. I'm often very cautious of people that use the word "never" in this industry so that should tell you how strongly I feel about it.

Benefits of GraphQL for me ordered from most important to least important

Typed API schema so there is no guesswork about what an API will return you. There is no guessing what query parameters need to exists for the API to work.
Expressing related data is extremely easy partly because of the point I made about about typed schemas.
The API only has to return to the client what the client asked for. This has the benefit of preventing the API from doing more work than it needs to and smaller payload sizes since the client will not ask for things it does not need.
Status codes have become kind of irrelevant where every response returns a 200 status code. This may be implementation specific, I'm not sure if it's actually part of the spec, but I use Apollo Server. This is a benefit because the use of status codes from developer to developer and API to API is so inconsistent.
Only one endpoint so there is no guesswork in figuring out what endpoints exist.

Thank you for writing this post. I hope more people start giving GraphQL a chance because of it.

Praveen Durairaju • May 14 '19

This is a good list to start with. Thanks for putting this out :)
We at Hasura recently launched learn.hasura.io - The 2 hour GraphQL Tutorial series for frontend developers. It is open-source. Would be a nice addition to the list above :)

Tomek Poniatowicz • May 15 '19

Added:)

Patrick Dronk • Feb 25 '19

This is definitely my goto: howtographql.com/

Tomek Poniatowicz • Feb 25 '19

Thanks, already on the list :)

Sir Muel I 🇳🇬 • Mar 1 '19

There is also Altair GraphQL Client as an alternative to GraphiQL.😄

Tomek Poniatowicz • Mar 29 '19

Added!

Kuldar 🇪🇺 • Feb 25 '19

There's also GraphQL Playground as an alternative to GraphiQL. 🙂

Tomek Poniatowicz • Feb 26 '19

Added :)

CodeAhoy • Oct 19 '19

Hi Tomek,

I wrote a tutorial from using a practical, hands-on approach to explain concepts (examples use the GitHub GraphQL so people can try it out.) Would appreciate if you add it here: codeahoy.com/2019/10/13/graphql-pr...

Thanks

Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦 • Feb 26 '19

You might like Apollo Elements for building graphql-backed UIs without UI frameworks.

Tomek Poniatowicz • Feb 26 '19

Thanks! Added!

Francois Dfr • Mar 4 '19

There is also the Apollo GraphQL community on Spectrum: spectrum.chat/apollo

Arseny Gordeev • Feb 26 '19

There is pretty active community related to GraphQL on the ReactiFlux Discord (look at #graphql).

Tomek Poniatowicz • Feb 26 '19

Cool, updated :)

Shreya Ranpariya • Jun 29 '19

Hi, Thanks for writing this :)

I'm building GraphQL playground - Firecamp which helps developers to the genertae query collection, Save and mutate query along with other technology stacks with most attractive UI. Appreciate if you can include Firecamp under this list :)