apollo-elements VS express-graphql

Using vanilla JS or TS or using web components and want to have a framework-independent way of doing things? You can stick to the GraphQL codegen itself since it takes care of almost everything underneath. Or if you want, you can also use Apollo Client’s vanilla version @apollo/client/core. Apollo Elements does come with support for a lot of webcomponent libraries like Lit, Fast and Gluon or even without any of it and hence is quite flexible.

It looked a little janky but it actually worked fine. But then I needed file uploads. Something graphql-zeus does not support. So I had to create a small wrapper for the SDK created so that it worked. And then also express-graphql, the server I was using, was deprecated.

This seems like a minor deal unless you're not using Express as your web framework. And an important note here is that Express GraphQL is being deprecated by the GraphQL Foundation. So if you're using Express for a GraphQL API, you should move away from it anyway.

You might have seen other GraphQL server solutions where the schema is implemented by using a more programmatic approach. Here is an example of how schemas are implemented using the express-graphql library. (link: https://github.com/graphql/express-graphql)

I'm not sure where the "8MB limit" comes from but, indeed, there are issues like this where, in some implementations, the response size is limited to 100KB: https://github.com/graphql/express-graphql/issues/346

With Node I used express-graphql as opposed to something like Apollo because it's lighter and less heavy on resources compared to Apollo.

Daniel Rearden listed the following reasons pushing him to create Helix, believing that these factors were absent from popular solutions like Apollo Server, express-graphql and Mercurius:

Express GraphQL is a library for building production ready GraphQL HTTP middleware. Despite the emphasis on Express in the repo name, you can create a GraphQL HTTP server with any HTTP web framework that supports connect styled middleware. This includes Connect itself, Express and Restify.

If you are using Node.js there are a lot of implementations of GraphQL servers with a few being express-graphql, apollo-server, mercurius, graphql-helix and more. And if you are using other languages, you can see a great list here

express-graphql GitHub Repository

Not sure about other libraries but it's certainly not the case for express-graphql on node.js. You can tie the graphql endpoint to any method you like. On the site I work on, we have a graphql endpoint that only accepts GET requests in production and is thus cacheable by Cloudfront. In dev and staging we accept all requests so that GraphIQL works.