GraphQL as a migration strategy for REST APIs

Click for: original source

Traditional API architectures like SOAP and REST have been powering the web for a long time. But over the past five years, a change towards a more flexible and frontend-driven approach to API protocols has started, using GraphQL. But moving from a traditional API architecture like REST towards GraphQL can be challenging. Not only does your team need to adapt to GraphQL, but it also means you could be losing your investment in your current API architecture. By Mark Smallcombe.

Luckily, you can create a clear migration path from REST to GraphQL using StepZen. You get the advantage of adding GraphQL to your stack, but you can still leverage all your current APIs. In this post, author will show how you can use your existing REST API endpoints while migrating to GraphQL.

The article covers:

  • Mapping REST API endpoints to GraphQL
  • Combining REST API endpoints
  • Migration path with Authentication

You map REST API endpoints to GraphQL types and operations. These types and operations can combine the responses of multiple REST API endpoints at once. If you’ve already invested in your application’s authentication flow, you can leverage these investments by adding this flow to your GraphQL schema. Nice one!

[Read More]

Tags apis how-to restful devops web-development open-source