join-monster VS graphql-directive-rest

GraphQL could be efficiently translated into SQL and things certainly try, but the only thing close to a "bulletproof" implementation I found was Join Monster (https://github.com/join-monster/join-monster) in NodeJS-land and even that I think is now mostly abandoned. GraphQL as a system was built assuming random-access to data stores is ~free because that's what Facebook has, but the rest of us don't :)

REST is not a strict specification and it's not a single implementation, you can just start doing it.

That said, I wouldn't recommend going the allow everything flexible resolver way like GraphQL: it's terrible for performance (eg. most APIs use N+1 queries unless you have something like https://github.com/join-monster/join-monster), the complexity of the codebase skyrockets and having to specify all the fields you want is not exactly ergonomic in most situations.

In this case, @rest is a custom directive that can be applied to a query. In the above example, we've supplied only one argument to the directive (endpoint). StepZen uses this directive to write the resolver that handles the getArticles query so that it can connect this query to data from the supplied REST endpoint. StepZen has a similar directive, @dbquery, for connecting a database backend. There are also community implementations of a similar @rest directive.