When most of us think of web APIs, we think of REST (Representational State Transfer). You send a request to a request-specific URL, and you receive the results as HTML, XML, JSON, plain text, PDF, JPEG... whatever format makes sense for the application.
Facebook’s web API system, GraphQL, provides a new way to define APIs. Developers use a strongly typed query language to define both the requests and the responses, allowing an application to specify exactly what data it needs from an API. Thus GraphQL is meant to provide a more efficient, structured, and systematic alternative to REST.
[ Getting to know Node? Don't miss: Node.js tutorial: Get started with Node.js • 10 JavaScript concepts every Node developer must master. • The complete guide to Node.js frameworks • 7 keys to structuring your Node app. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld’s App Dev Report newsletter. ]In this article we’ll lay out how GraphQL is different from REST, how those differences impact API design, and why GraphQL often makes a better choice than REST for fetching data from a server.