Designed by Facebook in the year 2012, GraphQL is a query language, a syntax that is used to load data from a server to the client.

The word 'graph' of GraphQL signifies that our query can crawl towards the Rest API and get a particular matter, and 'QL' stands for Queried Language. GraphQL was designed to make the queries smarter, which wasn't possible with the Rest API.

Though introduced by Facebook, GraphQL is not linked to any specific database or storage engine. Instead, they are backed by your existing code and data. GraphQL was officially published only towards the end of 2015. It is now used by applications like Pinterest, Twitter, Sky, Shopify, Yelp, and many more. The image below represents how GraphQL works:

Though GraphQL is better than Rest API yet it has not been able to replace Rest API completely in terms of efficiency and quick response. Most of the apps do not require GraphQL. Though it's an advantage, it is not a necessity. Platforms like Facebook, Pinterest use GraphQL where millions of queries are directed every day. GraphQL is considered to be efficient due to the following reasons:

• Specificity
• Flexibility
• Cost-effectiveness
• Time-saving

Agile Organizations

It is a term used to describe organizations that are ready to customize their workplace and environment based on the needs of their customers or clients. They are open to learning from experience, and they prefer to adopt a style of public communication that involves collaboration and sharing.

They can perform their duties, i.e., the ability to develop and deliver products way quicker. Almost all of the agile organizations claim themselves to be customer-centric. They heed to customers’ reports and base their output according to their needs.
Most of the agile organizations are focused on long-term business investment. Some agile organizations include Google, Amazon, Adobe, Netflix, Spotify and Pinterest.

Case Studies

GraphQL is used by teams of all sizes in many various environments and languages to power mobile apps, websites, and APIs.

Here are various companies where GraphQL has been successfully implemented:

• Artsy: GraphQL improved the page load speeds at Artsy by reducing payload sizes and number of requests.
• Yelp: In mid-2017, Yelp became one of the most notable companies to release a public GraphQL API.
• Coursera: Coursera enabled 1,000s of REST APIs across micro services to work with GraphQL automatically.
• Fabric: Fabric implemented authorization in their GraphQL API, and they limit backend request concurrency in queries.
• New York Times: New York Times website uses GraphQL, easily binding data to React components with Relay.
• PayPal: At PayPal, GraphQL has been a complete game changer to fetch data and build applications.
• Shopify: GraphQL makes Rich less apprehensive that changes to the environment will impact his integration.
• GitHub: GitHub chose GraphQL for our API v4 because it offers significantly more flexibility for our integrators.

While these were some prominent examples, there are many organizations around the globe that are utilizing GraphQL.

How does GraphQL benefit agile organizations?

Although there are multiple benefits of GraphQL for agile organizations, some of them are listed below:

• Clients have the power to dictate exactly what they have from the server, and receive that data in a predictable way
• Ability to retrieve many resources during a single request
• It is strongly-typed, which allows API consumers to understand exactly what data is out there, and in what form it exists
• Every GraphQL service defines a group of types which completely describes the set of possible data

The introduction of GraphQL is a boon for agile organizations. The features of GraphQL, which involve flexibility and specificity, have benefited these organizations as their role mainly focuses on customers and quick responses.

Agile companies are exposed to a million queries each day, and it is quite difficult for them to process all the queries. It is both time-consuming as well as costly. This is where the importance of GraphQL comes into picture. It allows querying of multiple data sources and that too from a single endpoint. This way, it enables the user to access a lot of data from just one course with a single query.

For customer-centric companies, this GraphQL also promotes client-based applications. The vital feature of GraphQL is its speed, as it provides only the data asked. As agile organizations are known for their prompt response towards their customers, this feature is a matter of great advantage for them.

Outcomes of using GraphQL

The use of GraphQL results in smooth running and that too in an organized manner. The schemas of GraphQL are predictable and answer in the exact order as the queries. This makes them manageable, making work a lot easier.
The increased clarity of the code and documentation allows it to optimize production speed. The readability of GraphQL is highly superior and can be picked by any developer. GraphQL is not linked to any programming language, making it flexible. This allows step by step change. This feature is beneficial to those organizations that generally avoid getting into an uncharted development territory. The linkup with GraphQL enables the organizations to include additional features and projects.

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Conclusion

Agile organizations make decisions quickly, constantly turning but always supporting their customer-centric principal place. GraphQL, with its advantages, has made the lives of agile organization developers easy. 93% of companies who are currently using GraphQL in production a majority is using it for external facing applications, according to medium.com.

GraphQL has turned out to be a boon for the content creators. It has encouraged agile organizations to take up the paths they refrained from taking earlier.

With GraphQL, applications run faster because the queries are specific to what is asked. They do not support unnecessary data, which is cost-effective too. Developers are quite delighted since it leads to a reduction in the need for response parsing. GraphQL has simplified processes for all users by offering a single view of content which comes from multiple sources. Organizations that have utilized this technology have become more agile. While the ones which are still thinking to adopt GraphQL can undergo a transformation when they introduce it.

Gaurav Gautam Associate - UI at Altudo

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