Heads up! To view this whole video, sign in with your Courses account or enroll in your free 7-day trial. Sign In Enroll

Introduction to GraphQL

Preview

Start a free Courses trial
to watch this video

Sign up for Treehouse

GraphQL vs. REST

2:37 with Isaac Lee Morris

How does GraphQL differ from REST services? In this video, we will go over some simple example REST APIs, and what they would look like expressed with GraphQL.

New Terms:

Further Reading:

GraphQL vs. REST by Sashko Stubailo

Related Discussions

Have questions about this video? Start a discussion with the community and Treehouse staff.

Sign up

    Related Discussions

    Have questions about this video? Start a discussion with the community and Treehouse staff.

    Sign up

    If you've built a modern web application, 0:00
    chances are you've used a REST API at some point. 0:03
    REST has been the gold standard for 0:06
    API development since as far back as 2000 when Roy Fielding published 0:08
    his paper that demonstrated a more intuitive way of organizing APIs. 0:12
    While REST has served the web community well, in the past 15 years, 0:18
    we've also learned some of the challenges that come with it. 0:22
    Let's take, for example, a simple Hollywood API which exposes data about 0:25
    various movies and the studios involved in producing them. 0:30
    Say we wanted to fetch some information about a specific movie 0:35
    from the Hollywood API using REST. 0:38
    We'd probably hit an endpoints that looks something like this. 0:41
    We'd use an HTTP get method with a base path of movies, 0:44
    followed by a parameter containing the movie ID, for example, Gone with the Wind. 0:49
    The API would respond by returning a movie object, 0:55
    which would contain simple fields that describe the movie. 0:58
    Like an ID, a title, and a tagline. 1:01
    Say we only needed the title of a specific movie. 1:05
    Best case scenario, 1:07
    we'd have to add an unintuitive query string to the end of our request URL. 1:09
    Or even more likely, we wouldn't be able to make this change at all. 1:14
    For more complex objects, 1:18
    it would probably feature fields that contain references to other objects. 1:20
    For example, it might have a studio field. 1:24
    But the studio field wouldn't contain the actual studio object. 1:27
    Instead, it would have an ID that could be used with the studio's end point. 1:32
    In order to get information about the studio, 1:37
    we would need to make another request with the studio ID. 1:40
    That end point would return more simple fields like the studio name and 1:44
    location and maybe the IDs of movies that the studio had produced. 1:48
    Now, let's use the same example to see how Graft QL differs from REST. 1:54
    With Graft QL we would have a root level end point for movies called movieById. 2:00
    However, unlike REST, 2:06
    when querying that endpoint we can include as many or as few fields as we need. 2:07
    Not only that, but when querying for a movie, we could actually request that 2:13
    GraphQL embed the details about its studio in the same response. 2:18
    So we only have to make one request to learn more about both items. 2:23
    We'll dive into more about this later in the course. 2:28
    For now, just note that GraphQL allows us to nest complex data in a single request. 2:31

    You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to download course files.

    Sign up

      You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to set up Workspace

      Sign up