05-31-2022 GraphQL Landscape Weekly Report

This is a weekly report providing a snapshot of the GraphQL landscape that is of interest to the wider community. Items added to the report may not have occurred in a given week, but were found that week. Things here may change depending on your feedback or improvements in layout or format. Let the experiment begin!

People

Identify the people each week who are doing interesting things within any of the areas below.

• Name: Min Chen, Sr. Staff Engineer, LinkedIn
• Description: Highly motivated lead software engineer with PhD degree in CS and over 10-year extensive software development experience.
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/minchen07/

• Name: Christina Hastenrath, SWE at Postman
• Description: Implemented WPGraphQL for Postman's WordPress blog.
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ettinchen?lang=en
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinahastenrath/
• Github: https://github.com/ch264

Adoption

• Name: Major League Baseball Web Platform implements Federated GraphQL
• Description of Use: Olessya Medvedeva and Matt Oliver discuss how they have begun to implement a Federated GraphQL architecture to solve the issue of service discovery, sprawl and ultimately getting the data needed.
• URL: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/graphql-major-league-baseball/

• Name: Chief
• Description of Use: Chief is on a mission to change the face of leadership. Launched in 2019, Chief provides senior executive women with a vetted community of peers, a trusted support system, and business critical insights to strengthen their leadership and magnify their influence. It is built with Typescript and React on the frontend; GraphQL, Loopback, and Postgres on the server.
• URL: https://boards.greenhouse.io/chief/jobs/5461847002

The Beat

Interesting issues on Github

• Title: Hint that a field of an union or interface type will resolve only to types specified in the selection set
• Description: It could be helpful if there was a way of hinting via the schema (and introspection) that a specific field of an interface or union type will only resolve to those types that are explicitly selected via fragment/inline-fragments on the selection set within the executed document. E.g. via a directive.
• URL: https://github.com/graphql/graphql-spec/issues/951

Interesting discussions on Github

• Title: The Proposal Currently Known As Client Controlled Nullability: Discussing A Name Change
• Description: At the last working group meeting, folks raised concerns that the current name of the proposal may no longer reflect its goal or content. If we're going to change the name, it's better to do it sooner rather than later before we get a bunch of release/blogposts/documentation that uses a name that will eventually be abandoned.
• URL: https://github.com/graphql/graphql-wg/discussions/965

News

• Title: GraphQL Composite Schemas Working Group
• Description: This proposal for a new working group in the GraphQL organization is widely supported and well received. Expect it to launch soon. It will include these topics: schema stitching, federation, graphql joins, and modules that "extend type".
• URL: https://github.com/graphql/graphql-wg/pull/977

Interesting Tweets

• Title: The Linux Foundation makes GraphQL Conf attendance free for everyone
• Description: Announcement of Linux Foundation code to use for free registration to GraphQL Conf in addition to OpenJS which are colocated events.
• URL: https://twitter.com/leeb/status/1530193408567828481

Interesting Videos

• Title: Federated GraphQL to Solve Service Sprawl at Major League Baseball
• Description: How they have begun to implement a Federated GraphQL architecture to solve the issue of service discovery, sprawl and ultimately getting the data needed.
• URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npQ6o1QO7D4

• Title: Automated GraphQL Schema Generation from ER-based Service Modeling
• Description: LinkedIn is made up of thousands of RESTful microservices built on the open-source rest.li framework. To layer GraphQL on top of existing microservice infrastructure, we need a scalable way to define and evolve the GraphQL schema that is implicitly captured in this swarm of REST APIs. This talk will present an automated GraphQL schema generation framework based on existing REST service definition that is enriched with a declarative entity-relationship modeling specification.
• URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dklY8v__gL0

Tools

• Title: GraphQL Toolbox
• Description: A searchable registry of GraphQL tools.
• URL: https://www.graphqltoolbox.com

• Title: GraphQL Hive
• Description: An open-source registry of schemas with many additional features to enhance your day-to-day work with GraphQL
• URL: https://www.graphqltoolbox.com/listings/graphql-hive

Events

• Title: GraphQL Conf + OpenJS World, June 7 - 8
• Description: Learn about GraphQL best practices from industry experts and become part of the thriving GraphQl community.
• URL: https://twitter.com/leeb/status/1530193408567828481

Social