mercurius VS subscriptions-transport-ws

GraphQL Gateway is primarily responsible for serving GraphQL queries to consumers. It takes a query from a client, breaks it into smaller sub-queries, and executes that plan by proxying calls to the appropriate downstream subgraphs. When we started our journey, there was only Apollo Federation in the arena, and we used it. Still, now you can look at other options (e.g. Mercurius, Conductor, Hot Chocolate, Wundergraph, Hasura Remote Schemas), compare benchmarks and decide what's important and preferable for your needs. The Gateway provides a unified API for consumers while giving backend engineers flexibility and service isolation.

If you're using Fastify with Mercurius as your GraphQL adapter, you may be looking for some advanced usages. In this article, we'll explore a real world example with Dynamic GQL queries with Mercurius.

Loader: it is a built-in DataLoader-Like solution that is quick to set up and use.

In this post I will show you how to implement NestJS😻 with GraphQL in code first mode, using Mercurius and the "platform" to Fastify.

What this does is to overwrite or augment the types exposed by the pointed module, and can be used (for example) when relying on autogenerated code. One interesting case of this is GraphQL to TypeScript code generation, and how this is integrated with the amazing Mercurius library (made by some of my colleagues at NearForm! 😜).

When moving away from Apollo Server, and you're looking for a replacement built with JavaScript or TypeScript, let me give you some options. If you want to keep building your GraphQL API schema first, you might want to consider Mercurius (which relies on Fastify) or GraphQL Yoga. If you're going to build your GraphQL API code or resolver first, have a look at TypeGraphQL or Nexus. Alternatively, there are great GraphQL-as-a-Service solutions such as StepZen in case you no longer want to build, maintain and host your own GraphQL API.

Let's start with data. We live in amazing times and it's really easy and cheap (or free) to get started with storing and working with data online. Take for example a PlanetScale MySQL-compatible database, Fastify Node.js Server, Prisma database mapper and a GraphQL connector like Mercurius and you have an entire backend stack. For this example we assume you already have a backend or you want to connect to a 3rd party database like the GitHub GraphQL API.

In this chapter, we assume a basic understanding of GraphQL and focus on how to work with the built-in @nestjs/graphql module. The GraphQLModule can be configured to use Apollo server (with the @nestjs/apollo driver) and Mercurius (with the @nestjs/mercurius). We provide official integrations for these proven GraphQL packages to provide a simple way to use GraphQL with Nest. You can also build your own dedicated driver (read more on that here).

Why would I want to use Apollo Client? So far in my career I have used some server graphql scaffolding (webonyx/graphql-php for PHP and mercurius for Node) and just used the fetch API (or whatever ajax API around XMLHttpRequest) against that server with the body being an object with

Only for people who are clueless. Apollo server is probably the worst node.js server to use for your graphql schema. It's terribly slow. You should look into https://mercurius.dev

Additionally, we created a bit more work for ourselves by upgrading the library we use for GraphQL subscriptions over web sockets, moving from the seemingly unmaintained subscriptions-transport-ws to the active graphql-ws project (which is URLQ’s library of choice for subscriptions).

Okay but seriously, if you've fallen down the rabbit hole of Apollo docs pointing you towards one library (subscription-transport-ws) which then points you to another (graphql-ws) , and so on and so forth, then hopefully this helps pull you out.

I'm looking for graphql server that can do queries and mutations over websocket, like subscriptions-transport-ws. Juniper and async-graphql both looks promising and async-graphql at least uses wording Subscriptions (WebSocket transport) in features but i couldn't find much more or any examples about that from the docs or repo.

graphql-yoga is built on other packages that provide functionality required for building a GraphQL server such as web server frameworks like express and apollo-server, GraphQL subscriptions with graphql-subscriptions and subscriptions-transport-ws, GraphQL engine & schema helpers including graphql.js and graphql-tools, and an interactive GraphQL IDE with graphql-playground.

The javascript implementation is at subscriptions-transport-ws

Okay, so, how do I use WebSockets to add support for the GraphQL subscription operation? Doing a basic Google search, you’d be faced with a single solution, namely subscriptions-transport-ws. Looking through the repository, checking recent comments, reading through the issues and open PRs - might have you notice the abundance of bugs and their security implications. A summary can be found here.

While subscription-transport-ws from Apollo initially started off this journey, it is not actively maintained and GraphQL WS by Denis definitely is a great replacement to that having no external dependencies and having the ability to work across many frameworks.

apollo-server plans to remove WebSocket support, which is currenlty done over the deprecated graphql-ws protocol (as implemented by the unmaintained subscription-transport-ws module by apollo), in the next major version.

https://github.com/apollographql/subscriptions-transport-ws, which is used by Apollo Server does support executing queries and mutations actually but you are better off moving away it anyway (check the text in their README!)