MERN Stack & GraphQL - #1 Intro to GraphQL

Welcome to MERN full-stack tutorial series with GraphQL! By the end of this course, we're going to build a chat SPA with a Node.js server using Express.js, MongoDB database engine, React.js front-end, and GraphQL API back-end. We will also architecture our GraphQL web service with Apollo Server and Apollo Client v2, and will implement routing with React Router v4. Developed by Facebook in 2012, GraphQL is a query language and a server runtime for APIs. It is backed up by a spec and comes with official integration libraries for many languages, including JS, and frameworks, such as Express. With its vast open-source ecosystem, GraphQL offers an easily-implementable approach for orchestrating multitier apps with complex API communications. Instead of querying resources with multiple roundtrips in a RESTful API, in GraphQL, you send off queries to a single URL to get back a particular data structure that you need. Forget about under and over-fetching of data. Using a strongly-typed schema, you map out your query requests to any data source that your app has in place, be it a database or a 3rd-party API. With full control over queries, your clients, mobile or web, now exchange data more efficiently, incurring a lesser load on your infrastructure, and tolerating poor network signals. Top 5 Reasons to Use GraphQL https://blog.graph.cool/top-5-reasons-to-use-graphql-b60cfa683511 GraphQL spec rundown https://github.com/facebook/graphql#readme GraphQL Server Basics (schemas, resolvers, etc.) https://blog.graph.cool/graphql-server-basics-the-schema-ac5e2950214e GraphQL vs. REST https://dev-blog.apollodata.com/graphql-vs-rest-5d425123e34b Learn GraphQL.js http://graphql.org/graphql-js/