Developer Experience (DX) describes the experience developers have when they use a product. It matters in the same way that User Experience (UX) matters. When users are happy, they’ll continue to use and tell everyone about your product.
But Why GraphQL?
Introspection; this allows the user to see the entire GraphQL schema. Sending in a request for types and their objects will return everything one needs to know to perform queries on the data presented by the API. This allows a developer to write queries without any other API documentation.
Granular queries; GraphQL is a query language for APIs that allows customized, compact queries that return small responses, that in turn eliminate unnecessary response data and makes applications faster. It also reduces the need for response parsing, which increases developer velocity and makes developers happy.
How about the GraphQL ecosystem?
There are plenty of tools in the GraphQL ecosystem that will help you provide a delightful DX for your team. During this session you learn about some of those tools but more importantly, you will be able to learn from code snippets when and how to use them.
How about Drupal and GraphQL ?
Well this is where things start getting a little complicated, every modern CMS platform as Contentful, GraphCMS, Storyblok, open source project as Strapi, Keystonejs and even legacy CMS as Wordpress provide a GraphQL API that expose data in a structured way but that is not the case for Drupal at least not on the v4.x
But there is a module for that, and you can take advantage of the GraphQL Compose, a Toolkit for generating GraphQL schemas in Drupal. The main goal of this project is to provide a GraphQL spec compliant schema generation for the GraphQL module v4.x
We are working on making Drupal 8 truly API-first: API-first initiative.
- Improving Drupal GraphQL, to become best-in-class.
- Bringing Drupal GraphQL support for automatic schema generation stable.
During this session you will learn about the current state of the schema generation in Drupal and GraphQL v4.x and what the plans are to shape the future of the web using Drupal.
