graphql-helix VS graphql-spec

Depends on language, I've build GraphQL servers in a few, though mostly JavaScript and Python. For Python I used to use Graphene, these days I use Strawberry.

For JavaScript, I originally used graphql-js and express-graphql, as these were the original libraries and I was a literal day 1 adopter. All the libraries are essentially just wrappers around graphql-js, so it's still viable to use directly. But for schema-building I now use Pothos (https://pothos-graphql.dev/), I'd probably use graphql-helix as the http layer (https://github.com/contra/graphql-helix).

If you want a lower level graphql server https://graphql-helix.vercel.app/ or https://benzene.vercel.app/ might be worth checking out.

While there are many GraphQL server packages available, we need one that will play nicely with Nuxt3's server engine (Nitro / h3). In the spirit of keeping things extensible and framework-agnostic, GraphQL Helix seems like a really good choice. Let's add it to our project:

Looks interesting, have you tried graphql-helix?

When using a JavaScript server, a convenient way to achieve this is with GraphQL Helix, which decouples the handling of the HTTP request from the GraphQL server. With Helix, we can have the routing logic be handled by a Node.js web framework (such as Express.js or Fastify), and then — depending on the requested path (i.e., the requested endpoint — we can provide the corresponding schema to the GraphQL server.

GraphQL Helix is a framework and runtime agnostic collection of utility functions for building your own GraphQL HTTP server. Instead of providing a complete HTTP server or middleware plugin function, GraphQL Helix only provides a handful of functions for turning an HTTP request into a GraphQL execution result. You decide how to send back the response.

import { envelop, useSchema, useLogger } from '@envelop/core'; import fastify from 'fastify'; import { processRequest, getGraphQLParameters } from 'graphql-helix'; // This creates the `getEnveloped` function for us. Behind the scense the wrapped functions are created once, here. const getEnveloped = envelop({ plugins: [useSchema(schema), useLogger()], }); const app = fastify(); app.route({ method: ['POST'], url: '/graphql', async handler(req, res) { // Here we can pass the request and make available as part of the "context". // The return value is the a GraphQL-proxy that exposes all the functions. const { parse, validate, contextFactory, execute, schema } = getEnveloped({ req, }); const request = { body: req.body, headers: req.headers, method: req.method, query: req.query, }; const { operationName, query, variables } = getGraphQLParameters(request); // Here, we pass our custom functions to Helix, and it will take care of the rest. const result = await processRequest({ operationName, query, variables, request, schema, parse, validate, execute, contextFactory, }); if (result.type === 'RESPONSE') { res.status(result.status); res.send(result.payload); } else { // You can find a complete example with Subscriptions and stream/defer here: // https://github.com/contrawork/graphql-helix/blob/master/examples/fastify/server.ts res.send({ errors: [{ message: 'Not Supported in this demo' }] }); } }, }); app.listen(3000, () => { console.log(`GraphQL server is running...`); });

Fortunately, we now have libraries like Graphql Helix, which, in my humble opinion, should replace express-graphql as the reference HTTP implementation since GraphQL Helix is also not tied to any web server framework.

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

Graphql Helix

GraphQL's first draft release was 8 years ago. [1]

It's first non-draft release was 5 years ago. [2]

It's first release under a community foundation was 2 years ago. [3]

[1] https://spec.graphql.org/July2015/

[2] https://github.com/graphql/graphql-spec/releases/tag/June201...

[3] https://github.com/graphql/graphql-spec/releases/tag/October...

I'm a big believer in GraphQL (in fact, at time of writing I'm #2 contributor to the GraphQL spec itself) so it pains me that a tool I built doesn't always have easy ways to achieve the "versionless schema" design that GraphQL encourages when it comes to making significant breaking changes to your underlying database tables. (Personally, I think you should aim for your database schema itself to be versionless, but this is not always possible.) Of course you can build your PostGraphile schema over views instead of tables, but views have their own problems that I won't go into here…

I created a proposal for Map type but didn’t make it through.

https://github.com/graphql/graphql-spec/pull/888

The issue with GraphQL is it tries to appease too many masters.

Similar to jsx. The language isn’t evolving.

The good thing is the spec is (almost) frozen, so there’s many implementations, the bad is it can encompass the flexibility of json schema can do.

Longer thread - Subscriptions RFC: Are Subscriptions and Live Queries the same thing?

https://github.com/graphql/graphql-spec/issues/284

You’ve probably figured it out by now, but for others who may be in a similar position; GraphQL is a specification (with various implementations) and you can read up on the spec here: https://spec.graphql.org/

If you're asking whether GraphQL supports anonymous objects that can be arbitrarily nested then no, it doesn't.

show this feature request some love https://github.com/graphql/graphql-spec/issues/174

* Performance: It's just hard to track down what makes an operation slow. The waterfall nature of resolvers is a big contributor

[1] https://github.com/graphql/graphql-spec/issues/488

:::note GraphQL Union is available for Types only, not for Inputs. However, the oneOf directive will bridge the gap in the future.