IMHO: The way we often approach GraphQL execution is a little dated. It’s perhaps legacy thinking from times when we had data layers that couldn’t be expected to scale even for the majority of use cases. But that has completely changed over the last 5-10 years - DBs can scale pretty massively, for specific workloads with very little work required at the app server layer. So if we used DBs to actually model as close to our domain entities as possible (and yes, we’ll need multiple DBs sooner or later), then a huge part of our work is already technically done.
So - here’s another way to approach building GraphQL:
1. Build a “read graph” so that you get a highly composable API that can almost entirely be pushed down into a data layer (eg: Postgres). This would involve techniques similar to building a compiler. Which is hard, but the great news is that it’s easy to make reusable across people who share the same data layer (Eg: Postgres).
There are only 2 business logic concerns at layer, both of which can be pushed down, which helps simplify the problem.
1) modelling/transformation: which can be done in the language of the data layer and pushed down (like views)
2) authz: which can also be done in the language of the data layer and pushed down (like rls)
2. The “command graph”: a set of controllers written in whatever language you please that makes changes to the data layer (or delegates to an orchestration system) and returns a reference to the read graph after having made changes.
This is kind of how we approach the problem at Hasura - a connector SDK that makes it easy to build reusable query compilers for different DBs or API services.
And it’s been great to see similar ideas in the ecosystem - let’s make it easy to execute a tree of functions of create a query plan, instead of executing a tree of data fetch functions (like the OP). Grafast by the postgraphile folks comes to mind.
So - here’s another way to approach building GraphQL:
1. Build a “read graph” so that you get a highly composable API that can almost entirely be pushed down into a data layer (eg: Postgres). This would involve techniques similar to building a compiler. Which is hard, but the great news is that it’s easy to make reusable across people who share the same data layer (Eg: Postgres).
There are only 2 business logic concerns at layer, both of which can be pushed down, which helps simplify the problem. 1) modelling/transformation: which can be done in the language of the data layer and pushed down (like views) 2) authz: which can also be done in the language of the data layer and pushed down (like rls)
2. The “command graph”: a set of controllers written in whatever language you please that makes changes to the data layer (or delegates to an orchestration system) and returns a reference to the read graph after having made changes.
This is kind of how we approach the problem at Hasura - a connector SDK that makes it easy to build reusable query compilers for different DBs or API services.
And it’s been great to see similar ideas in the ecosystem - let’s make it easy to execute a tree of functions of create a query plan, instead of executing a tree of data fetch functions (like the OP). Grafast by the postgraphile folks comes to mind.