We took part in the recently held GraphQL Summit in San Francisco.
The conference was exciting, and it had a great line up of talks. As expected, the enthusiasm in the GraphQL community was unmatchable.
We took part as one of the platinum sponsors of the event, and we also unveiled the new GraphQL API for Dgraph. Read along as we share our experience at the event as it unfolded.
The GraphQL connection
Dgraph’s love affair with GraphQL is not new. Back in 2015, we chose it to be the query language for the database right at the outset.
But, the simplicity of GraphQL makes it infeasible to express all database operations with it. Rather than exposing a subset of functionalities through complete GraphQL spec compatibility, we chose to sway away a bit, and this led to GraphQL+-. Over the years, the GraphQL community constantly desired for the full spec compatibility. Developers wanted the power of Dgraph, but integrated into GraphQLs growing ecosystem, tooling, and workflows. We obliged!
Here is an article by our founder, Manish R Jain, if you are curious to learn all about our journey with GraphQL!
The way GraphQL kicked off in recent years has been incredible. We first witnessed the enchanting energy of the community when we participated at the GraphQL Conf early this year in Berlin.
It’s around the same time we decided to build the GraphQL API for Dgraph!
Dgraph at the GraphQL Summit
And now, Dgraph’s GraphQL API is here! We decided what better place to demonstrate it than the GraphQL Summit!
So there we were, as one of the platinum sponsors, thrilled to showcase our brand new GraphQL API to the broader community.
Dgraph and its new GraphQL API
For those who don’t know about Dgraph, here’s a short description.
Dgraph is an open-source, distributed, transactional Graph Database. Our mission is to enable, simplify, and empower developers to build scalable applications on the cloud. Applications that could continue to thrive even as the size, complexity, and relationships of your data continues to grow.
We wanted to enhance further the developer experience of building apps on top of the distributed Graph Database. Our goal was to enable app developers to be able to get started in minutes.
We did precisely that with our new GraphQL API.
And here’s how it works!
You need to represent your app data as GraphQL types in a text file, and submit it to Dgraph. Dgraph instantly gives you the CRUD GraphQL API’s which can read from and write into the database. All of it without having to write any backend code, or use a database ORM or even running your own GraphQL server.
If that sounds interesting, check out the docs for the GraphQL API at https://graphql.dgraph.io. Give it a try, and do let us know what you think!
And If you are curious to learn more about the Graph Database in general, check out our tutorial series on the same.
Conference day!
The conference was held in Hyatt Regency, Embarcadero, San Francisco. With participation from over 1,200 developers, this was the world’s largest conference dedicated to GraphQL. The conference featured over 60 technical talks across three tracks!
The stage was set. The speakers, participants, organizers, and sponsors were all geared up.
The Summit was all set for a magnificent show!
Live tweets
We took the opportunity to share the excitement with the rest of the world by live-tweeting about it. It’s still not too late to scroll through the tweet thread and get the highlights of the conference :)
Here’s the thread for Day 1 of the conference.
This is the live tweet thread for day 1 of GraphQL summit. Feel free to mute the thread if you're not interested🔇#GraphQL #GraphQLSummit @apollographql @graphqlsummit
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 30, 2019
Here’s the thread for Day 2 of the conference.
This is the live tweet thread for day 2 of GraphQL summit. Feel free to mute the thread if you're not interested🔇#GraphQL #GraphQLSummit @apollographql @graphqlsummit pic.twitter.com/pVVIB85IcK
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 31, 2019
The conference talks
Apollo’s Co-founder and CTO, Matt Debergalis, kicked off the GraphQL Summit with his Keynote address.
Obsessed with the mission of bringing GraphQL to every developer on the planet, he shed light upon some recent advancements at Apollo. He enlightened the audience on the importance and advantages of decoupling the apps from their services, using a graph gateway.
Then he explained how the Apollo federation could help you build this Graph gateway to all of your organization data.
GraphQL summit 2019 kicks off with the opening keynote from Matt Debergalis (@debergalis), Co-founder and CTO at @apollographql.#GraphQL #GraphQLSummit pic.twitter.com/R77DTlVKIu
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 30, 2019
If you take a closer look at the talks, we could broadly categorize them into the following sections.
The GraphQL adoption and success storyHere are some of the talks where the speakers shared the GraphQL adoption and success story at their organization.
Brie Bunge, Software Engineer at Airbnb, shared the GraphQL migration story at Airbnb.
Brie Bunge (@briebunge), Software Engineer at Airbnb, shares the journey of migrating to GraphQL at @Airbnb.#GraphQL #graphqlsummit #airbnb pic.twitter.com/6cVG7dnpnw
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 30, 2019
Dan Boerner and Jim Gust shared how GraphQL is transforming Expedia’s goals to create seamless customer experiences across their frontend platforms.
Here's Jim Gust, a Sr Technical Product Manager and Dan Boerner (@dan_boerner), Distinguished Product Manager at Expedia. It was wonderful as they took us through the journey of how GraphQL adoption transformed customer experiences at @expedia.#GraphQL #graphqlsummit #expedia pic.twitter.com/O9e2ic7UsL
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 30, 2019
Gopal Holla, Staff Software Engineer at Linkedin, took the audience through the GraphQL use case at Linkedin.
He shared how Linkedin is leveraging GraphQL to enable easier addition and access of entities in the Economic Graph. He presented LinkedIn’s vision for modeling entities, defining privacy rules. He also shared their plan around using GraphQL to enable a consistent access experience across online, nearline, and offline environments.
Did we hear Gopal say, "Graph Traversals!"?
Catch Gopal Holla(@vgkholla), Staff Software Engineer at @LinkedIn, as he speaks about the GraphQL journey at his organization. #GraphQL #graphqlsummit #LinkedIn pic.twitter.com/yhDG81E3dy
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 31, 2019
GraphQL Best practices
James Lawrie, a Lead Software Engineer at The New York Times, shared their story of scaling GraphQL.
James Lawrie, Lead Software Engineer at The New York Times (@nytimes) takes the audience through their journey of how they scaled GraphQL.#graphqlsummit #graphqlsummit #NYTimes pic.twitter.com/czBYjXG08K
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 31, 2019
Ben Newman, Apollo Client Architect at Apollo, shared the techniques to fine-tune Apollo client caching for your data graph.
Ben Newman (@benjamn), Apollo Client Architect at @apollographql, sheds light on best practices for fine-tuning Apollo Client caching for your data Graph.#GraphQL #graphqlsummit #cache #javascript pic.twitter.com/lUpYNVmcOF
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 30, 2019
Michelle Garrett, Software Engineer at Condé Nast International, spoke about scaling your GraphQL API beyond a single consumer. In her talk, she discussed how to transition a client-specific GraphQL layer into a universal graph for multiple consumers.
Fantastic insights and lots of learning! It was excellent watching Michelle Garrett (@msmichellegar), a Software Engineer at Condé Nast International (@CondeNastEng), with her talk titled Scaling GraphQL Beyond a Backend for Frontend.#graphqlsummit #graphql pic.twitter.com/7UYNaRejHW
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 30, 2019
Marc-André Giroux, a Senior Platform Engineer at GitHub, spoke about caching and GraphQL. In his talk, he debunked some myths and shed light on the best practices around caching & GraphQL.
Great to see a talk from Marc-André Giroux (@__xuorig__) from @github after @thegraphqlconf in Berlin!
His talk on Caching & GraphQL was very insightful!#graphqlsummit #GraphQL pic.twitter.com/HU0jIiVdl9
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 30, 2019
This talk by Alex Banks, Software Engineering Instructor at Moon Highway, was the most fun-filled talk of the conference. In his talk, he took a deep dive into subscription implementation and state management. He also touched upon solutions for scaling real-time GraphQL applications.
It was amazing to see the super energetic "The Alex Banks (@moontahoe) 🌙😉", a software engineering instructor at @MoonHighway! Fasten your seat belts and learn subscriptions in GraphQL.#GraphQL #graphqlsummit @OReillyMedia @eggheadio @reactjs pic.twitter.com/DiS3NtBPqR
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 31, 2019
Chris Sauvé, Web Developer Lead at Shopify, shared how they scaled GraphQL applications at Spotify.
He covered the testing, monitoring, and performance tricks to build a client-side app with hundreds of GraphQL operations.
Curious to learn lessons about client-side GraphQL at scale? Don't miss this talk by Chris Sauvé (@_lemonmade), Senior Web Developer Lead at @Shopify as she shares the GraphQL scale story at @ShopifyEng.#GraphQL #graphqlsummit pic.twitter.com/eDBZGOXkLL
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 31, 2019
Shruti Kapoor, Software Engineer at PayPal, spoke about State Management in GraphQL using React Hooks & Apollo.
Oh hey! Great to see Shruti Kapoor (@shrutikapoor08) charming the audience again after @react_india. This is the talk to be at if you're eager to learn state management with React hooks and @apollographql Client. @PayPalEng @reactjs #ReactJS #GraphQL #graphqlsummit pic.twitter.com/WyZaaiUPeh
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 30, 2019
Kiran Kumar Abburi, The Founder at neostack.com and a co-organizer of React Bangalore meetups, taught the tips and tricks when building offline-first apps with GraphQL & Apollo.
Oh, hey Kiran!
Kumar Abburi(@kiran_abburi), Founder at @neo_stack and organiser of @ReactBangalore , shares his expertise around implementing offline apps with GraphQL & @apollographql .#GraphQL #graphqlsummit #ReactJS pic.twitter.com/ZWljQMtlek
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 31, 2019
Jon Wong, Staff Software Engineer at Coursera, took the audience through a journey into writing GraphQL apps in almost every language.
Jon Wong(@jnwng), Staff Software Engineer at @Coursera, reveals the ways to use GraphQL in (almost) every language.#GraphQL #graphqlsummit pic.twitter.com/gXeSJAoPC7
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 31, 2019
Daniel Woelfel, Founder at OneGraph, shared his thoughts on the future of GraphQL tooling.
Daniel Woelfel(@danielwoelfel), Founder at OneGraph(@onegraphio), takes the audience through his thoughts around future of GraphQL tooling and developer experience.#GraphQL #graphqlsummit pic.twitter.com/sR37mL1JR8
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 31, 2019
Natalia Tepluhina, a Senior Frontend Engineer at GitLab, gave insights about how they moved from Vuex to Apollo state management at GitLab.
Nice talk by Natalia Tepluhina(@n_tepluhina), a Senior Frontend Engineer at @GitLab , and also a core team member at @vuejs. It was interesting to listen to the journey of how Gitlab moved from Vuex to state management using Apollo.
#graphqlsummit #gitlab #GraphQL #Vue #JS pic.twitter.com/FWowRllTsp
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 31, 2019
Tanmay Gopal, CEO & Co-founder at Hasura, shared his thoughts around building high-performance real-time GraphQL API on existing data sources.
It's Tanmai Gopal(@tanmaigo), CEO & Co-founder at @HasuraHQ!
Follow along as Tanmai shares his take on building a high-performance real-time GraphQL API on existing databases and data sources.
#graphqlsummit #GraphQL pic.twitter.com/lBT7JMXgZY
— Dgraph Labs (@dgraphlabs) October 31, 2019
The closing notes
The GraphQL Summit ended on a high note.
In the last couple of years, developers, startups, and enterprises are adopting GraphQL at a staggering rate. The passion in the GraphQL community has been spectacular, and their excitement for the technology is phenomenal. Modern applications and their data requirements are becoming more complex than ever before, while the users’ expectations keep on getting higher. Meeting these expectations seamlessly across a variety of devices and platforms has made the app developer’s life harder.
GraphQL provides an elegant solution to solve the needs of a modern app. It encourages you to build the mental model of your application data as a Graph. The intuitiveness of the query language makes it simple to express the data requirements and operations of even the most complex application.
Hence, we at Dgraph, are excited about the GraphQL wave and it’s adoption!
And to add to that excitement, we were very thrilled by the responses and feedback we got community for our new GraphQL API!
Before we end, if you haven’t tried Dgraphs new GraphQL API yet, do give it a try, and we would love to hear back from you.
The #graphqlsummit has wrapped but you still are right on time to give @dgraphlabs's new #GraphQL API a try!
A full-fledged graph database that you already know how to use ... and even integrates with @apollographql federation!https://t.co/rnjxOWogec
— GraphQL Summit (@graphqlsummit) November 1, 2019
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.dgraph.io/post/graphql-summit-19/