GraphQL for Modern Commerce

Chapter 1. Introducing GraphQL

Of the thousands of new commercial and open source projects that are released every year, only a handful end up becoming widely used industry standards. GraphQL is one of those technologies for a very simple reason: it brilliantly solves a host of problems for a wide range of constituencies.

This book provides a solid overview of GraphQL and its application to commerce. In this first chapter, we cover GraphQL itself—the problems it solves, how it intersects with REST, and why it’s such a natural fit for commerce. In the second chapter, we look at the GraphQL specification itself, including key terminology, how to model your schema, and how to write queries, mutations, and subscriptions. In the third chapter, we explore GraphQL from a frontend developers’ standpoint and look at the role that clients can play. Finally, in the fourth chapter, we focus on GraphQL servers, which are actually responsible for executing queries against the schema and performing the requested action.

Note

We use the term “queries” to capture all of the operations that you can execute against a GraphQL server, even though GraphQL also supports mutations (changing data) and subscriptions (watching for changes to data).

Commerce Requires More Than REST

In the 1990s, commerce platforms shipped with the frontend and backend as one indivisible unit. In that decade, the web was the only channel and developers needed only to build a website. Given the immaturity of frontend frameworks, ...