Davis Technology Consulting
Over the past three years, Meetup has undergone a transformation from relying on REST APIs to fully embracing GraphQL. Despite the many benefits, it hasn’t been without its challenges.
In this talk, I’ll cover the benefits of using GraphQL in production, such as how it can streamline API development and improve data retrieval. I’ll also discuss common challenges that arise when implementing GraphQL in production and share best practices for addressing them.
Continue ReadingI’ve been on a caching crusade. I’m working to reduce the load on our database by focusing on various caching solutions. In an ideal world, data that is “static” will be heavily cached; minimal database interaction required. However, that’s not the world I’m living in. Each request to our GraphQL API leads directly to a database hit. Ugh!
Apollo GraphQL offers a few caching solutions to help with this endeavor. We decided to go with the responseCachePlugin. This plugin stores cacheable data in a datastore of your choice, for us that was Redis. The key thing to keep in mind is that the data must be cacheable. Which leads us to “the problem.”
GraphQL is a query language for your API. This allows you to interact with your existing web services and databases in a new way. Instead of relying on a predetermined output structure from your API, you can “query” it and choose only the fields that you’re interested in. In this talk, learn what GraphQL is all about and how you can take advantage of it in your applications.
A few key GraphQL terms we’ll cover are:
We’re going to explore how you can create a GraphQL Server with a stack written entirely in Kotlin. Then we’ll take a look at how you can integrate the Apollo Client library inside of a Kotlin-powered Android application. GraphQL isn’t going away, so here’s your chance to get a grip on this exciting technology!
There are several freely available datasets online. One platform I came across was Kaggle. It supports analytics competitions based on user-mined datasets. After a bit of digging, I uncovered a CSV file of user reported UFO Sightings. This turned out to be interesting data. For instance, which countries had the most reported UFO sightings? Is there a particular day of the week where sightings occur the most? I had so many questions! My first step however, was to expose the data as a GraphQL API.Continue Reading
