What is GraphQL?

#

📝 This lesson's quiz can be found - here.
🗒️ Solutions for this lesson's quiz can be found - here.
📖 This lesson's lecture slides can be found - here.

What we've built so far with our Node app conforms to what a REST (which stands for REpresentation State Transfer) API is. In traditional REST APIs, the client can interact with the server by accessing various endpoints to GET, POST, PUT, or DELETE data while leveraging the HTTP protocol.

To get all the listings in our app, we had to make a request to the /listings endpoint. If we wanted our server to serve data for just one listing, we could implement a /listing/:id endpoint (where :id is the dynamic id value of a certain listing). If we had mock user data, we could implement a /users endpoint to return all users or a /user/:id endpoint to serve user data for a certain user.

Now, let’s consider an example scenario. What if a client app needs to display some user information plus all the listings for that user. This client doesn’t have to be ours, someone else could have developed a web or mobile app that interacts with our API. How could this scenario play out with REST?

With an example REST API, the client could make a request to a /user/:id endpoint to fetch the initial user data.

1. `/user/:id` - to fetch certain user data

Then the client could make a second request to something like a /user/:id/listings endpoint to return all the listings for that user.