GraphQL is gaining purchase outside of the JavaScript communities and this seems like a pretty good thing. Shopify and GitHub have jumped on board. Absinthe (Elixir) and graphql-ruby have caught my attention, though I haven’t had an opportunity to tinker with them yet.
That said, I like that GraphQL (and JSON API) let service developers focus on exposing a specific data model and optimizing access to it rather than taking a side quest through REST API design. For application developers, building screens and interactions with the data they need defined inline seems like a big win for contextual understanding.
As ever, the risk of using any kind of mapping layer, whether its objects and relational data or JSON object graphs to downstream service calls, is creating a naive, one to one mapping that create awkwardness and inefficiency.
