Whenever Frank Black was singing about the death of the single line editor he could have just as easily been singing about the future fall-off of REST popularity. REST is wonderful at exposing simple single-consumer APIs. However, it starts to fall down when you need to provide a non-breaking long term solution that multiple clients with various concerns must depend on. To solve this and many other problems we have GraphQL.

This talk focuses on how to build out a Node.js hapi server to meet the needs of various GraphQL clients. Additionally, it will focus on how to make GraphQL requests from a server to other servers. This talk will also cover basic approaches to testing these GraphQL services. Finally, the talk closes with thoughts around securing these GraphQL services.

Everything in this talk is oriented toward the modern JavaScript Engineer who is interested in learning about the shortcomings of REST and the reasons why GraphQL is gaining popularity.

This talk focuses on the flaws with REST and how GraphQL addresses them. It also highlights some of the remaining challenges with GraphQL and ways to address them.