An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
With RESTful APIs, the API creator must predict what data consumers of the API will want, and how they might want to organize them.
GraphQL reverses this approach, empowering the consumer of an API to specify the data they’re looking for, and in what format. GraphQL thus supports most modern digital application requirements better than REST, as various queries from different devices and channels are essential to the broader digital experience.
Apollo offers a platform that supports GraphQL. At its center is a graph router that brings together the metadata representations (i.e., schemas) of available data sources into a consolidated data representation.
Because this graph router composes subgraphs, it supports composability at the point of query (thus offering JOIN capabilities) as well as composability at the back end, typically consisting of microservices and database endpoints.
Development teams can work on subgraphs independently, where Apollo brings them together via federation. This federation is declarative, supporting build-time validation and routing analysis as well as declarative routing in production and extensibility over time.
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