Re: Thoughts on Facebook's GraphQL?

Thanks for taking a look at this and providing really interesting thoughts
to chew over, Manu and Tom. I'm not near implementing something like this,
but the ability to compose those powerfully specific requests for paged
data was interesting, if incredibly complicated. Paging with JSON is
tricky. For now, I'm mostly returning large and complete sets to avoid
adding too much complexity too early in development.


Nate

On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 9:41 AM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
wrote:

> On 02/13/2015 10:05 AM, Tom Morris wrote:
> > Sounds a lot like the Freebase Metaweb Query Language
> > <https://developers.google.com/freebase/v1/mql-overview> (MQL),
> > except they use "calls" to parameterize things instead of MQL's
> > query-by-example templating.
>
> Good comparison, Tom. MQL totally slipped my mind, and you're absolutely
> right.
>
> I'm personally much more fond of query-by-example (QBE) rather than the
> funky "get a cursor, shove it in the JSON result, and make calls using
> that cursor" approach that Facebook took.
>
> That said, their approach favors speed/pagination, and I don't think we
> are prescribing how to do anything for that. In general, I'd say that
> passing database implementation information (like database cursors with
> the data you're returning) breaks the abstraction between the back-end
> database and the REST API service. If you want to do it for performance
> reasons, go for it - but please don't try to standardize it :).
>
> Also, note that the identity credentials stuff uses query-by-example
> (look at Example 6):
>
>
> http://opencreds.org/specs/source/identity-credentials/#reading-identity-information
>
> It's currently undecided if we should be passing in a JSON-LD Frame or
> just an empty query-by-example JSON blob. Clearly, we need to flesh this
> part of the spec out, but any result should be blatantly simple to use
> (which is why we're shying away from JSON-LD Frames at the moment and
> are instead just using a simple flat QBE mechanism). Another option in
> the future would be just passing in a SPARQL query if you /really/ want
> a more powerful graph query and creation language.
>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: The Marathonic Dawn of Web Payments
> http://manu.sporny.org/2014/dawn-of-web-payments/
>
>