API World 2017

Change is hard, but driving the transformation from REST to GraphQL in your organization is a challenge worth the reward. Join Tom Bray as he shares lessons learned on Ticketmaster's journey from "GraphQL Demo" to "All-in on GraphQL".

In this talk, you'll learn how to:

* Gain buy-in with compelling demos built with Apollo Launchpad and Expo

* Anticipate frequently asked questions and have answers ready

* Set up the early adopters for success with the tools, training, and resources they need to get started and become productive

* Manage "API sprawl" as adoption spreads across your organization without stifling innovatio

Coursera's platform is composed of hundreds of APIs, implemented across dozens of services by various engineering teams. Our client engineers have faced many challenges while using these APIs, especially around discoverability and assembly of data from various services. We’re working to solve these problems by migrating all client data access from REST to GraphQL. Our path to GraphQL is different than most -- instead of manually adapting each of our REST APIs for GraphQL, we built a dynamic assembly layer that unifies our distributed APIs into a single GraphQL endpoint and corresponding schema. This unified schema allows clients to access data from across our various services in a single query. In this talk, I’ll cover why we’re transitioning to GraphQL, share challenges and learnings from building our GraphQL assembly layer, and discuss a few open questions we have around designing APIs for simultaneous REST and GraphQL usage, and who owns the business logic in GraphQL. 

Join me as I describe how we use GraphQL at Credit Karma and what we learned about developing and using it at scale. This includes how we designed and built our initial version, how it quickly became our next monolith and what we are doing to decompose it.  I’ll share insights on some key technologies I expect to see in the future that could change how GraphQL servers will scale.

GraphQL improves both your API’s performance and the performance of your team in general. Schema-first GraphQL development forces front- and backend teams to agree on a strict contract up front, enabling them to work quickly and efficiently while staying on spec. Danielle Man discusses the benefits of schema-driven development and shares lessons learned using GraphQL in production, building open source tools for the GraphQL community, and going from zero to GraphQL with two production applications.

This efficiency is enabled by great tools in the GraphQL ecosystem like GraphQL clients, data mocking systems, and GraphQL developer tools. If you design your schema up front, your backend teams have a strong spec to develop to and your frontend teams can start building components immediately. Danielle shares how her team was able to build a production app in less than three months using this approach and showcases how to leverage ecosystem tools in a GraphQL developer workflow.

With the advent of microservices and the proliferation of APIs, even the simplest applications require significant API orchestration logic as they find the data they depend on scattered across an ever growing number of systems. Even with the newer protocols, developers still need to do a significant amount of heavy lifting. In this fun and thought provoking talk we will take a look at a new set of technologies, currently under development, that let developers easily combine data from multiple services exposed via RESTful or GraphQL APIs by writing declarative graph queries instead of code and delegating orchestration to a new kind of "query" engine - one that understands how to talk to data services as well as APIs. We will discuss the main shortcomings of the current state of the industry, explore the possible solutions space, understand (briefly) different techniques for automating data-gathering across distributed/federated systems and, finally, take a look at a couple of real world scenarios and working code. This talk will aim to be equal parts content and inspiration. We hope to spark interest in exploring higher level abstractions and protocols for publishing and connecting systems.

Let’s face it, REST APIs can be problematic, and hypermedia hasn’t quite proven to be the answer we’ve looked for.  GraphQL has quickly become more popular offering a solution to the problems REST created - but opens back up the very problems REST was created to avoid (remember SOAP?).  But what if there was a way to take the best of both: enter API chains.  In this session we’ll take a look at the pros and cons of REST, GraphQL, and a new specification and library for chaining numerous resource calls into a single HTTP request.