apollo-server VS express-graphql

Another interesting point is that executing fetches on the server can allow developers to more easily leverage caching. Next.js already handles caching out-of-the-box and I’m curious to see if the wider adoption of RSC reduces the need to combine React with solutions like Apollo Server and Apollo Client. While there are other benefits to these tools, RSC could provide similar caching behavior without the need to invest in a GraphQL solution.

There are several GraphQL server implementations, however, for this tutorial, we'll utilize Apollo GraphQL's Apollo Server, a lightweight and flexible JavaScript server that makes it easy to build GraphQL APIs.

As I mentioned, their main GraphQL server package is[1], so that's where the confusion came from. Thanks.

[1] https://github.com/apollographql/apollo-server/blob/9817bc47...

While working on this blog post, I learned that Apollo Server, the most popular GraphQL server for typescript, uses a similar method for adding error codes to GraphQL. It even lets you add custom errors. Hopefully, someday other GraphQL server projects will follow them. Until then, we’ve got a strong indication we took the right approach.

GraphQL is just a schema, there are many different implementations of a GraphQL server, AppSync being one of them. I mentioned Apollo server in this series as well.

After some head-scratching, I opened an issue on Apollo Server’s GitHub repository. There, Apollo Server contributor @​glasser shared a helpful suggestion: why not invoke our AuthPlugin from Apollo Server’s context function? Throwing from context would ensure we can control the HTTP status response without having to introduce more methods and error checks to our AuthPlugin (like unexpectedErrorProcessingRequest). With that suggestion in mind, we rewrote our AuthPlugin as follows:

Apollo as a middleware in Express.js, actually.

Apollo Server 3 Cookie Issue #5775

Lastly, instead of writing our API core ourselves, we'll be using the star of this episode --- Apollo Server (a.k.a. GraphQL server). It has detailed documentation available here.

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.