10 Popular Open-Source GraphQL Projects and Tools You Have To Try
Top 3 GraphQL IDEs
1. GraphiQL
- GraphiQL supports the complete GraphQL language spec, including queries, mutations, fragments, and unions. This means that with GraphiQL, you have all you need to write, validate, and test GraphQL APIs.
- GraphiQL displays snippets of the schema documentation as you type and highlights errors in syntax in real-time, so you don't make mistakes when writing queries and know what you are querying for.
- GraphiQL keeps a running history of your queries. If you use these queries frequently, you can "star" them to keep them at the top of your history. This can save you time, so you can quickly refer to frequently used queries.
- GraphiQL is the highest-rated GraphQL IDE on GitHub, with an active developer community of over 200 contributors and 180 thousand weekly downloads on npm. With GraphiQL, you can set up an IDE instance for your server or a more advanced web or desktop GraphQL IDE experience for your framework or plugin, like this one we built graphql- online.
2. GraphQL Playground
- GraphQL Playground provides more intuitive API documentation, schema exploration, and GraphQL query debugging experience than GraphiQL with a much nicer UI. These features improve development workflows by writing, validating, and running GraphQL queries much smoother.
- GraphQL Playground features automatic in-session schema reload, which helps avoid schema changes and breakdown during query sessions.
- With GraphQL Playground, you can share your GraphQL Playground with other developers using the GraphQL share bin option. This can help when collaborating on projects with team members.
- Although GraphQL Playground has been retired and donated to the GraphQL Foundation by Prisma, it remains one of the most actively used GraphQL tools, with over 400 thousand weekly downloads on npm. The project is constantly updated with bug fixes and security patches, and the GraphQL Foundation is actively working on GraphQL Playground 2.0. You can embed GraphQL Playground into your application, either as a React component in your front-end app or on the server-side as middleware for frameworks such as Express, Hapi, or Koa.
3. GraphQL Editor
- GraphQL Editor supports API stitching. A developer can import schemas from other projects and use the types declared within the imported schema in the current projects. This feature speeds up the time required to create GraphQL schemas.
- GraphQL Editor supports query preview. It ships with an integration of GraphiQL that will render a GraphQL API under development with mock data. This feature accelerates development time as front-end developers can easily test and simulate GraphQL APIs without relying on backend engineers to create the GraphQL APIs.
- With GraphQL Editor, you can create a block diagram of all your GraphQL entities. This quality helps developers visualize and validate their GraphQL schema quickly.
- GraphQL Editor has an active GitHub community with a low "open issue count" (22) on GitHub. With GraphQL Editor, you can configure graphical elements within the IDE to create visual GraphQL entities that will also be rendered as code in the GraphQL type language right within the IDE. Also, you can work the other way and create the entity in code and have it rendered graphically in the GraphQL editor object palette.
Top 3 GraphQL Clients
1. Apollo Client
- Apollo Client requests and caches data from your queries and updates your user interface, which reduces the labor involved in creating client-side applications that interact with GraphQL APIs.
- Apollo Client has built-in pagination functionality that makes it easy to implement pagination in your client application.
- Apollo Client 3.0 features reactive variables. These variables can store data of any type and can be accessed anywhere in the application. Reactive variables can be an advantageous mechanism for representing local states outside the Apollo Client cache.
- Apollo Client is one of the most popular GraphQL projects with over 640 contributors and 114 thousand users on GitHub. With Apollo Client, you can build robust and scalable web apps for many UI frameworks (React, Angular, Vue, iOS, Android) that easily connect to GraphQL APIs.
2. Relay
- Relay supports declarative data fetching. Declare your data requirements using GraphQL and let Relay figure out how and when to fetch your data. This feature reduces the time and complexity required to consume GraphQL APIs in React applications.
- Relay allows deferred queries. This feature is particularly useful to render long pages, for example, a news feed where you find a long list of posts where you need to define data priorities.
- Relay has built-in features for local memory data caching. Relay associates each piece of data with a unique ID compares server data with the local memory cache via that unique identifier and updates the differences. This is useful when dealing with bandwidth-constrained networks.
- Relay was created by the original GraphQL creators and continues to release new updates and features. It is heavily optimized for performance and comes with an opinionated structure that helps you manage a high level of complexity, enabling developers to build React applications confidently.
3. URQL
- Caching in URQL is fully customizable through the exchanges. It supports "Document Caching" for content-heavy pages and "Normalized Caching" for dynamic and data-heavy applications. This allows you to easily set up caching on your client applications based on your specific requirements.
- URQL has first-class support for functionality such as offline mode, file uploads, authentication, and Next.js. This support means you spend less time implementing features such as authentication in your client application.
- URQL provides an extensibility mechanism that allows app developers to scale and customize the URQL GraphQL library to suit their needs.
- URQL has an active developer community with over 100 thousand weekly downloads on npm and a low "open issue count" (21) on GitHub. URQL gives you complete control over your GraphQL operations and results via "exchanges." URQL exchanges allow you to customize your data layer to suit your needs, helping you build web applications with ease.
Top 3 Custom GraphQL Servers
1. Apollo Server
- Apollo Server supports automatic persisted queries, which lets clients send a calculated hash instead of a complete query string over the network. This technique reduces query latency and bandwidth requirements, especially for large and complex queries.
- Apollo Server includes an integrated metrics reporting agent out of the box, making it easy to diagnose GraphQL API performance problems.
- Apollo Server includes standard error handling capabilities that make it easy to handle re-authentication and build error-aware UI components and interactions.
- Apollo Server has an active developer community with over 400 contributors and 460 thousand weekly downloads on npm. Apollo server ships with everything you need to build production-ready self-documenting GraphQL APIs with ease.
2. Express GraphQL
- Express extends its middleware capabilities to GraphQL endpoints. This capability allows you to set up middleware logic such as authentication before hitting the GraphQL API endpoint.
- Express GraphQL ships with some existing Express.js features such as support for cross-origin resource sharing (CORS), session management, and request body-parser, which means you do not need to reinvent the wheel for features like these when setting up your GraphQL APIs.
- Express GraphQL includes a TypeScript declaration file which enables auto-complete in compatible editors and type information for TypeScript projects.
- With over 600 thousand weekly downloads on npm, Express GraphQL is one of the most used GraphQL servers. With Express GraphQL, you can easily set up production-ready GraphQL APIs in Node.js.
3. Hot Chocolate
- Hot Chocolate has built-in support for data loaders, making batching and caching for query results from databases much faster.
- Hot Chocolate supports .NET Core authorization policies, so you can use authorization directives on your schema fields to enable base field authorization for better GraphQL API security.
- Hot Chocolate comes with built-in filtering and pagination, offering rich query capabilities through your GraphQL API.
- Hot Chocolate is one of the GraphQL projects expanding the GraphQL community beyond Javascript/Node and is gaining popularity in the .NET ecosystem, with over 2 million downloads on NuGet. Hot Chocolate is quite easy to set up and has an active developer community that continuously improves and implements new features. Hot Chocolate takes away the complexity involved in building GraphQL servers and APIs in .NET.
Get Instant GraphQL APIs on All Your Data With Hasura
- Hasura can simultaneously connect multiple databases to a single instance of the Hasura GraphQL Engine. This feature is particularly useful to enable GraphQL APIs on databases with different workloads, i.e., one database for search and another database for high-volume transactions.
- Hasura GraphQL Engine offers built-in filtering, pagination, and merging remote schemas. This feature accelerates the time required to build and ship production-ready GraphQL APIs.
- Hasura also caches your GraphQL query plan by storing the query string and variable values in an internal cache along with the prepared SQL statement. This technique leads to fast, highly optimized database calls.
- Hasura has an active developer community with consistent feature updates and is used by Fortune 500 companies such as Philips. This year alone, Hasura has included support for BigQuery and MS SQL Server databases in addition to Postgres. Additionally, with Hasura Cloud you have a fully managed, production-ready GraphQL API as a service to help you build modern apps faster. Get started in 30 seconds!
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