Top 3 GraphQL Resources for Vue.js Developers in 2021

The year 2021 completes the 6th anniversary of GraphQL ever since its inception in 2015 and as the spec grows, the community grows bigger. GraphQL is seeing greater adoption in the developer space because of features that make it suitable for building modern applications like real-time capabilities, introspection, auto-generated API documentation, etc. So we have curated the top 3 GraphQL resources for Vue.js developers as Vue.js takes a similar trend in popularity as GraphQL in the frontend space.

This blog post will focus on the following top-level categories:

• GraphQL clients
• Authentication
• Data fetching

GraphQL requests can be made using a simple fetch API call. However, specialised GraphQL clients are useful for automatically handling caching, improve query parsing and readability, and build reusable modules. Let’s take a look at some of these client libraries that have native support for your Vue projects:

• Apollo client: Apollo Client is a comprehensive and fully-featured client for managing GraphQL on the frontend. It has many benefits like caching, fetching, state management, garbage collection, etc.
  We have created a learn course to talk about how to integrate Apollo Client with Vue.js.
• urql: urql is a lightweight featured client with automatic caching and a slightly different approach to caching (everything is automagical as opposed to the manual caching approach). urql provides the Vue API, made available via Hooks that can be plugged into your Vue.js components.
  Check out the API documentation here.
• SWRV: With caching being an important piece of the modern app development process, a new wave of caching mechanisms hits the frontend ecosystem called SWR (stale-while-revalidate). SWR basically means whenever your app fetches data, the local cache (stale) will be served, then a fetch request (revalidate) will be made. SWR has a Vue.js implementation called SWRV meant to be used with the Vue Composition API.
• Fluent GraphQL clients: GraphQL queries are typically written as strings and parsed by these specialised clients better. Imagine how much better the experience could be if you can write your GraphQL query as objects instead. This is possible with the help of fluent GraphQL Clients.
• Villus: Villus is a lightweight client for Vue.js with a bundle size <4kb and is written in Typescript and supports typed queries. It is also cache ready.

JWT-based authentication in Vue.js

There are various ways to approach user authentication for your Vue.js applications. However, token-based authentication is traditionally used as a more straightforward way of creating an interface for users to create an account that they can log in and out of. Both actions of signing up and logging in will provide the user with a token.

You can make use of local storage for token management for authentication in your app. Vue comes with Vuex—a centralised state management store that helps you manage your auth tokens for your user data, and Vue-router—a tool that adds support for dynamic routing and handles authentication by authenticating routes in your Vue.js application.
Check out this course by Vue Mastery to learn how to combine JWT with Vuex and Vue-router to handle authentication in your Vue.js projects.

Additionally, there are various 3rd party solutions that you can use to manage user authentication in Vue.js:

• Auth0: Auth0 is an easy to implement, adaptable authentication and authorization platform. You can read more about how to configure Auth0 with Vue.js from our fullstack tutorial.
• Firebase: Firebase gives you a flexible UI, comprehensive security, and rapid implementation platform for user authentication. Learn more about using Firebase for authentication in Vue.js applications in this free course by Vue School.

There are various modes for data fetching that can be implemented in your Vue.js apps. Server-side rendering can be implemented to render pages on every request as opposed to statically generated sites that render pages on build time.

Server-side Rendered: Nuxt.js is a great tool to implement SSR in Vue.js. It is an intuitive and powerful open-source framework for building Vue applications that supports server-side rendering of data and abstracts away boilerplate code and gives out-of-the-box functionality for .

Statically generated: In this approach for data fetching, the website’s pages are generated at build time and HTML files are pre-generated with that data. Typical use-cases for statically generated sites are blogs, product pages in e-commerce websites, and content heavy sites that don’t change often.

• Nuxt.js: Besides SSR, Nuxt.js also supports statically generated websites. You don't require a server but still have SEO as it pre-renders all pages with HTML files pre-generated with the data.
• Gridsome: Gridsome is a JAMStack framework for building statically generated Vue.js websites and applications.

Let us know about your pick from the top GraphQL resources for Vue.js developers!