can you talk a bit more ? How do you write your views and integrate them with sangria. I'm coming from nodejs .. where everything is JS, so I'm trying to understand how this stack works.
Sangria is a scala GraphQL server. Facebook released an initial reference implementation in javascript, but I wanted the type-safety that scala gives. If you're more comfortable with JS you could check that out. See https://facebook.github.io/relay/.
With GraphQL you don't write views per se, but you make data available. The client can pick and choose which of the exposed attributes it needs to render a view. So if you have, say, a user profile page, you might use relay to declare that you need something like:
user(id: $userId) {
username
age
}
Then relay will hit your graphql server and add this data to your react props.
It's a similar thing with mutations - you expose operations through your server and then relay handles calling it with the necessary data, and propagating back the response into the UI.
I've found this approach to be very powerful and quick to develop in (once I got my head around it). With REST, you have to keep on adding new endpoints or fiddling with your server if you need more attributes from it. E.g. say you also want the user's gender. With traditional REST you'd need to make this change in your client (to request that extra data) and update your server to expose it. Or perhaps you'd add a new endpoint that returned more data about a user. Then you may also need to decide what happens with legacy clients. Should they fail if they receive extra, unexpected data, or do you version your API, etc.?
With GraphQL you can choose to expose all of the different attributes on your user model (with authentication/authorisation, etc as appropriate) in-advance, and then if clients need the gender, they can just request it via relay.
After I tried writing an app using REST and continually feeling like I was walking in mud, this is a real breath of fresh air, and I feel productive again. I definitely recommend checking it out.
I'm assuming your views are written in React.js - how does that get served to your clients ? does the Scala relay server serve it ... or do you have a separate client webapp ?
Yeah the views are all just react.js. The JS for the webapp is dumb so can be served by S3 (i.e. no server-side rendering). It's basically REST++ - a pure server that just serves data (sangria/graphQL server) and a decoupled client (which in my case happens to be a react web app for now).
