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GraphQL RealWorld API – TypeScript, JWT, MongoDB, Express and Node.js

Hello, Welcome to my blog!

Following up on my most recent post “RealWorld API – TypeScript, JWT, MongoDB, Express and Node.js”. I have modified the REST API I made into a Graph QL API.

What is GraphQL?

GraphQL is a query language for an API. GraphQL allows front-end applications to have control to specify the data received per request. All the data is available to you when you create a request, which means you can mix and match data per request. Drastically cutting down on the number of calls the front-end application has to make to the API.

My experience using GraphQL

I enjoyed using GraphQL, and I think it allows more flexibly than a REST API. There are many different flavours of GraphQL. I used Apollo Server Express. It was a bit of a steep learning curve, but once I built a few queries, I saw how easy to use it was.

Here is a list of some things that I learned about GraphQL. Examples can be found by viewing my code on git-hub.

  • GraphQL is not a database, It replaces your API router. It can be used with any database.
  • GraphQL uses a single POST route. On that POST route, you will make your Querys using the query language inside the HTTP body.
  • Unless specified, GraphQL will look for queries under the Query type.
  • The keyword mutation is used to tell GraphQL to change from looking at the default Query type to the Mutation Type.
  • It is best to practise to put all data fetching queries under the Query type and all data writing queries under the Mutation Type.
  • Postman works great to test your queries.
  • You need to define your schema using the query language GQL.
  • With Apollo authentication and error handling can be done when you create the Apollo server.

Conclusion

I definitely will use GraphQL for my future projects, and I like how flexible it is and that it is available for many different programming languages.

The code for this project can be found on my Git-Hub.
https://github.com/coreyjjames/GRAPHQL-REALWORLD-API-TYPESCRIPT

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RealWorld API – TypeScript, JWT, MongoDB, Express and Node.js

Hello, Welcome to my blog!

Recently, I subscribed to a tutorial website called Thinkster.io. Thikster has tutorials dedicated to making production-ready applications. They have tutorials for many different frameworks. I decide to go through their node.js tutorial.

I also wanted to get more comfortable with typescript, so I changed the tutorial up some by implementing the tutorial using TypeScript. The tutorial is written initially with regular javascript. I had the extra challenge of translating the tutorial to use TypeScript as I went through it. Going through this tutorial was a great experience. I learned some great techniques for building an API with node.js and TypeScript.

Programming with TypeScript was enjoyable. It cleaned up the code allot! Which is always a great thing. Since I have programmed in the past, with C, C++ and C#, I also found working with TypeScript very familiar.

I posted my code for this project on my Github. https://github.com/coreyjjames/REALWORLD-API-TYPESCRIPT

The tutorial also covered Postman. Postman is an application that allows you to test your API. I liked it allot, I have lightly used Postman in the past, but this time I used it extensively. I love how you can write test cases in Postman. It was handy at the end of the project to check for any bugs that got missed during the central development time.

In the next couple of weeks, I would like to improve this API some more by using a framework called GraphQl.

I’ll post another blog post when I finish!

If anyone has some improvements I can make to the code, let me know. 🙂