Magento is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms and it is widely used by the e-store owners because of its rich features and a vibrant community. Magento development has always come up with updates that included security patches, new features and functionalities and many more. As far as Magento API is concerned, it has decided to come up with a viable alternative to the REST architecture and SOAP protocol. It is here that GraphQL has come up.
It is an application layer query language that is created by Facebook in the year 2012. It aims to offer an alternative to the traditional REST API architecture and offers a syntax that describes how to ask for data. It is database agnostic and works by creating a single endpoint that is responsible to accept the queries, instead of depending on the REST API approach which has separate endpoints for each service.
GraphQL is everything about simplicity and this comes with a more elegant methodology and experience that is concerned with data retrieval. Since the data is gathered from the most common endpoint that is a variable concerting the type of it and request as stated in the call, many huge benefits are intrinsic to the system.
GraphQL supports both the read request and the write request and when you specify a query to retrieve the data, you must specify the field that you want to return. This aligns very well with the new proposed Magento query API where Magento users want to reduce data to retrieve and transfer.
GraphQL makes services or multiple resources available from a single endpoint unlike REST that uses a separate URL per resource. aAsingle request can include multiple queries, with an aliasing scheme so as to avoid name collisions. This is actually useful to share the HTTP request overhead with multiple requests. In the case of Magento development, this would avoid the PHP and HTTP startup overhead per REST call that is currently incurred.
Stability comes only with simplicity and this is the basic fact of life. The simpler a process is, the less likely it will have faults in the planning, development, execution and continued operation over time. The GraphQL makes the queries more elegant and simple and it is a result that improves the stability of the whole process.
The entry point that is defined by GraphQL is like a translatable layer and the structure is dictated by the server and then it is routed to the system or the resources by the language path itself. Thus, an application backend can be overhauled without having to completely restructure the client application as the methodology is directly controlled by the server in the first place.
Another most important benefit of implementing GraphQL is the importance to the API ecosystem as a whole. Most of the time an API can be easily organized into an understandable and simple schema and doing all these forces you to better understand and organize the data and the flow of it and also the inefficiencies and errors in the Magento website.
With Magento 2 development, the GraphQL schema would be dynamically generated from the available service contracts that are published by entity attribute definitions, loaded modules that allow the Magento developers to determine what the specific Magento site supports.
