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philplckthun | 5 years ago

That sounds interesting! But isn’t this like persisted queries (the Relay kind and not Automatic kind) without the benefit of prototyping your queries as a front end dev as you’re working on the front end?

I’d say that’s completely fair still, just wondering. I’d also say I understand the carefulness and stance on “smart clients,” i.e. normalized caching, which is why this isn’t a default in urql, but without it I think the discussion here is much more nuanced.

It’s so to speak much easier to rely on an argument with a smarter client and the Apollo ecosystem, than the rest. Anyway, I like your approach with Wundergraph so I’ll definitely check it out!

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jensneuse|5 years ago

I was asking myself an important question. When you write a Query, what activity are you actually currently involved in? You try to understand the API and want to query it. What's the easiest way to understand an API? Read the documentation? Where is the documentation? It's the schema, hence GraphiQL/Playground. So why would you want to switch back and forth between Documentation and Code when you want to understand an API? On the other hand, if you already use GraphiQL in your workflow, how does this look like? You write a Query in GraphiQL, then copy paste it into your code. Now if you want to add something else you go back to GraphiQL, search for another field and copy paste again. Compare that to WunderGraph: You keep getting back to GrapiQL and extend your Queries. You hit save and the code-generator re-generates the client. You don't even have to change the code if you just extended a query. The function call in the frontend simply returns more data. I wrote a feature page about this: https://wundergraph.com/features/generated_clients I'd really appreciate your feedback on it!

lukeramsden|5 years ago

It all seems very interesting, I may try and experiment putting it in front of my current prod GraphQL schema and making a few queries, once I get the auth stuff figured out. One question though, is any of this going to be open source? The on-prem-first focus you have is certainly a selling point for me as I already run my entire backend in Amazon's ECS so adding another service for the wundergraph would be very simple - however, I'm always weary of using non-open source software that I can't fork and patch, as I've had to do that many a time due to not being able to wait for patches to be upstreamed. Regardless, I think the points you make in your blog posts are spot on, and I'm looking forward to watching this project evolve.

philplckthun|5 years ago

That does sound very interesting. I believe the issue lies in the fact that this is a workflow-based “sales pitch.” What I mean is that this is a difference that doesn’t always apply depending on what tools you use (like client dev tools, type generation / hints, etc)

But what it does do is constrain. Now, constraints are great. They’re always a great tool to introduce new innovations. What I’m ultimately thinking is, how much do you bring to the table compared to persisted queries and tools like GraphQL Code Generator and the added flexibility that comes with those tools?

Genuine questions of course, not criticism