The steady rise of GraphQL

Today GitHub announced that the next version of their API will use a new technology developed by Facebook called GraphQL.

GraphQL may eventually come to replace the most common type of API today, the REST API.

In the documentation for the new version of their API, GitHub explained:

"GitHub is moving to GraphQL for v4 of our API because it offers significantly more flexibility for our integrators. The ability to define precisely the data you want — and only the data you want — is a powerful advantage over the REST API v3 endpoints.

"GraphQL is a new way to think about building and querying APIs. Rather than construct several REST requests to fetch data that you're interested in, you can often make a single call to fetch the information you need."

We've written a lot about GraphQL, and plan to create some GraphQL lessons in the near future.

In the meantime, if you want to learn more about GraphQL:

Read GitHub developer David Celis's "Give it a REST: use GraphQL for your APIs" (5 minute read)
Read JavaScript extraordinaire Sacha Greif's "So what's this GraphQL thing I keep hearing about?" (12 minute read)

Here are three links worth your time:

How to go from hobbyist to professional developer (14 minute read)
Between the Wires: An interview with data visualization scientist Irene Ros (15 minute read)
Parsing math expressions with JavaScript (11 minute read)