July 2025
Intermediate to advanced
414 pages
10h 22m
English
Content preview from Learning API Styles
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Chapter 6. GraphQL
In REST APIs, data retrieval is done by sending a request to a specific endpoint that describes a resource, and in most cases, the returned data comes in a fixed shape. The query-based API style allows you to build APIs in which the data returned by them mirrors the shape of the query. This chapter introduces you to GraphQL, a technology that represents a query-based API style.
While REST is the most popular API technology, GraphQL isn’t far behind.1 It was released by Facebook (now Meta) in 2015 as open source and later moved to the GraphQL Foundation. GraphQL is a query language for API, and a server-side runtime for executing queries using a type system that defines the data.2 Although GraphQL is agnostic to the transport mechanism, HTTP is the most common choice for data exchange between the GraphQL client and server. GraphQL also supports simultaneous bidirectional data transfers using GraphQL’s subscription operation, which often uses the WebSocket protocol (Chapter 10).
This chapter describes GraphQL’s origins, specification, security practices, and trade-offs. Next, you’ll implement WFS’s GraphQL API and compare it to the REST API style from Chapter 5.
Problems with REST
Despite being the most widely adopted, REST APIs come with shortcomings.
REST APIs are often tightly coupled to the data structures they expose, as their resources typically represent data models revealed by endpoints. This coupling makes it difficult to perform data changes without ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.