Picking a GraphQL Client

Table of Contents

There are a bunch of GraphQL clients that exist. How do you know which one is right for you? I'm going to discuss some of your options, but let's cut to the chase:

If you're building a front-end web-app, I recommend you use Apollo Client. If you want to take my recommendation, you can just skip to the next chapter.

But for those of you who are making a years-long, fundamental architectural decision for your team - you might want to read below to get a lay of the land.

GraphQL is just JSON over HTTP (well, usually)#

Because GraphQL servers are typically over HTTP, you don't have to use a client library at all. You can just use whatever HTTP request library you were already using and it will "work".

GraphQL is in this sense, more of a language/protocol pair than a specific library and it will work fine in any language where you can form queries and parse JSON - making it suitable for mobile apps, compiled clients, etc.

So as we covered in the first chapter, you can query a GraphQL server using curl,

The operationName here is the name of your query.

With curl, it would look like this: