Learning GraphQL

Chapter 1. Welcome to GraphQL

Before the Queen of England made him a knight, Tim Berners-Lee was a programmer. He worked at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Switzerland, and was surrounded by a swath of talented researchers. Berners-Lee wanted to help his colleagues share their ideas, so he decided to create a network in which scientists could post and update information. The project eventually became the first web server and the first web client, and the “WorldWideWeb” browser (later renamed “Nexus”) was rolled out at CERN in December 1990.

With his project, Berners-Lee made it possible for researchers to view and update web content on their own computers. “WorldWideWeb” was HTML, URLs, a browser, and a WYSIWYG interface in which to update content.

Today, the internet isn’t just HTML in a browser. The internet is laptops. It’s wrist watches. It’s smartphones. It’s a radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip in your ski lift ticket. It’s a robot that feeds your cat treats while you’re out of town.

The clients are more numerous today, but we’re still striving to do the same thing: load data somewhere as fast as possible. We need our applications to be performant because our users hold us to a high standard. They expect our apps to work well under any condition: from 2G on feature phones to blazing-fast fiber internet on big-screen desktop computers. Fast apps make it easier for more people to interact with our content. Fast apps make our users happy. And, yes, ...