graphql-tag VS apollo-server

In Apollo Server 3, you could import the gql template literal tag directly from the apollo-server library. This template literal tag is provided by the graphql-tag library and allows parsing a GraphQL query string to an AST that can be used by Apollo and other GraphQL libraries.

Handles parsing, some validation, normalizing and some sort of caching from what I can tell https://github.com/apollographql/graphql-tag/blob/main/src/index.ts

A common use of this feature is compilation of graphql queries, which looks like this.

indentation in Relay.QL Relay and gql, graphql GraphQL template literals

By template strings I mean this (use of Javascript template literals in Apollo). We had a large SpringBoot REST API. Frontend added an Apollo server that simply called our backend and crammed it into a graphql response (ignoring all the work we did for pagination and caching). Later backend inherited this codebase and was forced to maintain it. Both teams spent many man hours on this endeavor with unclear tangible benefits.

This features is so powerful that some awesome libraries were built on it such as Styled Components and graphql-tag.

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.