GraphQL vs REST: Battle of the API Design Architectures

While designing your next tech stack strategy, one thing that is bound to bother you is the selection of technologies. We all want to ensure we choose the best design structure available for APIs. When you have to choose between Restful and GraphQL APIs, the decision becomes all the more difficult.

When you want to build an API, you can consider four ways: GRPC, REST, SOAP, and GraphQL. However, most developers don't bother looking further than REST and GraphQL. While REST broke traditional API methods, GraphQL is famously known for being a better REST for building API.

Both of these methods are not at all similar. Both these technologies work by receiving the results after sending an HTTP request. However, both of them have their advantages and disadvantages, and this article is going to be a discussion about the difference and similarities between these two.

Before starting the battle of GraphQL vs. REST, we must fully understand what these two mean.

What is GraphQL?

GraphQL is a language for queries and a server-side runtime for APIs. GraphQL prioritizes providing clients with the requested data.

GraphQL is designed to help make the APIs fast, developer-friendly, and flexible. It can also be deployed within an IDE (integrated development environment). In addition, GraphQL helps developers build requests that pull data to a single API from multiple data sources as a REST alternative.

GraphQL allows API developers to depreciate or add fields without impacting an existing query. As a result, developers can develop APIs with whichever method they prefer, and the specification of GraphQL will ensure that they function predictably to clients.

Resolvers, schema, and other common GraphQL terms

Developers utilize GraphQL to build a schema that describes all the possible data clients may query through the service.

A GraphQL consists of object types, which explain what kind of object can be requested and what fields it consists of.

As a query arises, the query is validated against the schema by GraphQL. After that, the validated query is executed by GraphQL.

The API developers attach every field in a schema with a function known as a resolver. Then, the value is produced at the execution time by calling out the resolver.

Apart from validating and defining syntax, most of the decisions are left by GraphQL for developers to make. GraphQL does not provide guidance about how the data could be stored or what programming language must be used– developers have a lot to choose from, like; Python, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, etc. GraphQL provides no requirements for authorization, network, or pagination.

From the client's point of view, The most common operations of GraphQL are most likely to be mutations and queries. However, if we consider them in the CRUD model, a query is nothing more than R (read).

Facebook developed GraphQL to resolve the experience of their mobile app developers, who are working on REST APIs. Since the launch of its first open source version in 2015, humongous growth has been experienced by GraphQL, as this technology was adopted by the big players in the tech business.

What is REST?

REST is neither a protocol nor a standard. Instead, it is a set of architectural constraints. As a result, there are quite a several ways in which API developers could apply REST.

When a client requests the RESTful API, it helps transfer the representation of the resource's state to the person who made the request or to the endpoint. The representation, or the information, is delivered in any of the mentioned formats via HTTP: HTML, Python, PHP, XLT, or plain text. JSON is the most popular file format and is used frequently. Its name might be a bit fancy, but its language is agnostic and is quite easily understood by humans and machines.

There few more things that must be kept in mind: Parameters and headers are also crucial in the HTTP methods of a request through RESTful API HTTP request, as they consist of crucial identifier information as to the request's uniform resource identifier (URI), caching authorization, cookies, metadata, and more. In addition, there are response headers and request headers, and each consists of its own HTTP connection status and information codes.

To get considered as a RESTful, API has to fulfill these criteria:

• A client-server architecture consists of servers, clients, and resources, with requests managed through HTTP.
• Stateless server-client conversation means no client information is stored between requests, and every request is unconnected and separated.
• Cacheable data streamlines the interaction between the client and the server.
• A uniform interface between components ensures that the information is transferred in a standard form. Which requires:
  • Resources that are requested could be identified and are separate from the representations that have been sent to the client.
  • Clients can manipulate the resources via the representation received by them, as the representation contains enough information to manipulate.
  • Messages returned to the client are self-explanatory and contain enough information to describe how the client should process them.
  • Hypermedia/hypertext is available, meaning that once you have access to a particular resource, the client should have the ability to utilize hyperlinks to check out all the other actions they could take that are available currently.
• A layered system organizes every type of server (those responsible for load-balancing, security, etc.), which involves retrieving requested information into hierarchies that are invisible to the client.
• Code-on-demand (optional): The ability to send out the executable code to the client from the server when requested, which extends the clients' functionality.

Although REST API has these criteria, REST is still considered to be easier regarding usability than a protocol like SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), which has particular requirements like built-in security, XML messaging, and transaction compliances which make it heavier and slower.

Advantages of GraphQL

Below we have mentioned a few pros of using GraphQL, which explains why it is more than enough for developing the next billion-dollar app.

GraphQL is quick

Compared to other communication APIs, GraphQL is way faster, as it cuts down the need to request a query by selecting only the field you want to query.

Best for complex systems and microservices

Multiple systems could be integrated behind the API of GraphQL. They are unified, and GraphQL hides their complexities. The server of GraphQL is also utilized to grab data from the system that are already existing and pack them in the response format of GraphQL. This feature most benefits legacy infrastructure or third-party APIs as it is quite difficult to handle and maintain them because of their enormous size.

When we are required to get transferred to the microservice structure from the monolithic backend application, GraphQL API could help handle communication between the various microservices by fusing them together into a single GraphQL schema.

Under-fetching or over-fetching is totally out of the question

The main advantage of GraphQL over other APIs is; most of the API's response contains way too much or sometimes very little data; hence a need for another request is created. GraphQL solves this problem by fetching only the specific data in one request.

No requirement for the latest version

While using GraphQL, The returned data or result set is very particular according to a client's query. Hence, it is quite simple and easy to generalize it for the server. When we add a new product feature, it doesn't affect the already existing clients. An older server could be used without worrying about anything, as the server fields will continue to function even after it has been deprecated. You can witness Facebook using the same version of GraphQL API for their application.

Benefits of REST

Although GraphQL is gaining popularity, REST API is still the most popular API standard. Let's check out why:

• RESTful APIs are the simplest way to understand and learn. This is the main advantage of RESTful APIs.
• With REST API, a user can organize complex applications, and also REST API makes it easy to use resources.
• The heavy load could be easily managed with the help taken out of a cache & HTTP proxy server.
• It is quite easy to explore and discover the functionality of REST API.
• It makes it easy for new clients to work on different applications, whether it is designed particularly for a purpose or not.
• Standard HTTP plan-of-action call-outs are utilized to retrieve data and requests.
• Since REST API is dependent particularly on codes, it can be used for data synchronization with a website without even a single complication.
• Users could access the same data model and standard object when we compare it to SOAP-based web services.
• Standard-based protection is Allowed with the utilization of OAuth protocols in order to verify the user's REST requests.

Disadvantages of GraphQL

Now that all the advantages have been covered, let's discuss the disadvantages of GraphQL:

GraphQL query complexity

GraphQL should not be mistaken for a replacement for a server-side database. It is just a straightforward query language. The server performs database access as soon as a query is requested. However, when we are required to access multiple fields in a single query, whether in a GraphQL or RESTful architecture, the varied fields and resources are still required to be retrieved from the data source.

Hence, it also displays the same issue when too many nested field data are requested by a client simultaneously. Hence a mechanism like query complexity weighting, avoiding recursion, query depths, or persistent queries stops inefficiently from the client's side.

GraphQL caching

Comparatively, it is more complicated to implement a simplified cache GraphQL than in REST. This is because we access resources with URLs with REST API. Hence we can cache on the level of resource because we have the resource URL as an identifier. At the same time, it is quite tough in GraphQL as every query could be different, even though the same entity is used to operate. But an efficient caching mechanism is offered by the libraries built on top of GraphQL.

GraphQL rate limiting

Another issue with GraphQL is rate-limiting. Meanwhile, in REST API, you can easily specify that "we only want to allow a particular amount of requests in a day," but with GraphQL, it is tough to command this type of statement.

Drawbacks of REST

Now, let's discuss the drawbacks of REST:

Lack of state

The stateful mechanism is a requirement of most web applications. For example, suppose you buy a website that includes a mechanism of having a shopping cart. It is required to know the number of items in the shopping cart before making the final purchase. The client becomes responsible for maintaining the burden of the state, which makes the client application overflowing and tough to maintain.

Last of security

Security such as SOAP is imposed on REST. This is why REST is appropriate only for public URLs, but the passage between server and client REST is not recommended when it comes to confidential data.

Wrapping it up!

Both REST and GraphQL are useful depending on the needs of the user. However, they both come with their own pros and cons.

GraphQL is gaining popularity, particularly because of its "no under and over-fetching policy". Moreover, a more efficient collaboration mechanism is provided by GraphQL for the client side, making it a powerful and efficient tool, especially because the software industry adopts the agile framework. Overall, GraphQL is a tool used to achieve a particular query-oriented goal.

This article has explored everything an individual would require to decide which tool would be better for his firm. The advantages, drawbacks, and problems were discussed so that you could have a clearer vision before making a decision.

Now you have enough information to decide whether RESTful API or GraphQL is a better option for your upcoming project.

However, we won't claim which among GraphQL and REST is the best, as the answer to this question is very subjective and heavily influences your business needs and wants. Hence the last decision should always be yours based on our provided information.