I don't know, there are some tradeoffs there. Their sample appears to be "nearly JSON", which doesn't seem too helpful. Being close to but noncompliant with a standard doesn't bring anything but confusion.
And it isn't obvious what they're using for transport, but it seems like they aren't attempting to model programmatic resources as web resources the way that OData does. This is an okay decision if they're trying to make it transport-neutral (i.e. you can issue the same GraphQL request via Thrift or by HTTP POST), but in that direction lies the sins of SOAP.
In the past I've written a client-side caching layer for OData which was capable of doing the same automatic batching and partial cache fulfillment for hierarchical queries that they describe in the article. It is a good tool for writing complex client applications against generalized data services without giving up performance, and I'm not surprised that companies in our post-browser world are starting to move in that direction.
I'm a little bummed that Facebook is throwing its considerable weight behind yet another piece of NIH-ware, though. Beating up the REST strawman was a poor use of half of this article; I'd be much more interested to hear why we need GraphQL when there exists a standard like OData.
And it isn't obvious what they're using for transport, but it seems like they aren't attempting to model programmatic resources as web resources the way that OData does. This is an okay decision if they're trying to make it transport-neutral (i.e. you can issue the same GraphQL request via Thrift or by HTTP POST), but in that direction lies the sins of SOAP.
In the past I've written a client-side caching layer for OData which was capable of doing the same automatic batching and partial cache fulfillment for hierarchical queries that they describe in the article. It is a good tool for writing complex client applications against generalized data services without giving up performance, and I'm not surprised that companies in our post-browser world are starting to move in that direction.
I'm a little bummed that Facebook is throwing its considerable weight behind yet another piece of NIH-ware, though. Beating up the REST strawman was a poor use of half of this article; I'd be much more interested to hear why we need GraphQL when there exists a standard like OData.