Eric Baer is a software engineer based in Seattle and over the last decade he has worked on projects ranging from embedded systems in C++ to high traffic APIs in Java to large JavaScript applications. For the past five years, he has been working to specialize in JavaScript and the associated ecosystem. Most recently, he has been consulting through Formidable with companies like Starbucks and Walmart to drive large international e-commerce projects on the web.
GraphQL’s features are not a revolution, but what makes GraphQL powerful is that the level of polish, integration, and ease-of-use make it more than the sum of its parts. Many of the things GraphQL accomplishes can, with effort and discipline, be achieved using REST or RPC, but GraphQL brings state of the art APIs to the enormous number of projects that may not have the time, resources or tools to do this themselves. In this article, Eric Baer focuses almost entirely on why GraphQL exists and the problems it solves.
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Rather than exploring features first, it is helpful to put them into context and to understand how they came to exist. In this series, Eric Baer wants to introduce you to GraphQL. By the end, you should understand what it is and also its origins, its drawbacks and the basics of how to work with it. Today, Eric will go over how and why we have arrived at GraphQL by looking at the lessons learned from the last 60 years of API development, from RPC to now.
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