dociql VS graphql-introspection-tools

Magidoc is a GraphQL documentation generator

SpectaQL was originally forked from a project called DociQL to add some enhancements there. And DociQL was originally forked from a project called Spectacle to make it work with GraphQL. And (finally) Spectacle was designed to work with Swagger/OpenAPI. Swagger/OpenAPI is a specification designed to help standardize the description of REST APIs with many routes, and uses JSON Schema as the way to define Data Types/Models. This means that SpectaQL had to wrestle with several layers of history and transformations; making SpectaQL's enhancements fit into the DociQL world, which in turn had to make things fit into the Spectacle/Swagger/OpenAPI world.

There was one solution we found that was the closest to what we were looking for: DociQL. It's an open-source, node.js project that describes itself like this: "DociQL generates beautiful static HTML5 documentation from a GraphQL endpoint using the introspection query." Awesome!

After starting from scratch with a purely GraphQL mindset and landscape, these sorts of advanced manipulations became much easier to reason about and implement. Since there was no existing tool for it, we ended up creating a standalone package just for querying and manipulating the GraphQL schema in the ways that we needed. We then decided that others might find this tool useful, so we recently open sourced it as Microfiber. You can read my blog post about its release here.

A while back we introduced SpectaQL to the open source community and it's been a big success. It gets thousands of weekly downloads, has a healthy amount of user support and interest via github, and has had a number of articles written about it like this one and this one. Our goal for SpectaQL has always been to be the de-facto go-to library to use for auto-generating static HTML documentation for any GraphQL API. A very important feature of SpectaQL is its ability to "hide" any parts of your API that you don't want to expose in your documentation. This sounds like a simple task, but in practice it's actually a bit tricky. In order to make interacting and manipulating a GraphQL schema easy, we developed a tool designed specifically for this purpose. Eventually we realized that while this tool was super integral to SpectaQL, it would also be useful for other applications so we decided to break it out into its own library and open source it! In this post, I'll introduce Microfiber and give an overview of its most interesting features and capabilities.