Restify VS apollo-server

Restify & Fastify Hapi

Restify – Optimized NodeJS Microservice Framework

We've seen this framework forking happen a lot as good ideas are remixed like Aurelia via Angular, Derw via Elm, Restify via Express, and Spring Boot via Spring to name a few. It's interesting to me this obsession with performance that Preact has with their ability to provide a simple API. That said, I am in no way convinced this'll solve the architecture problem. Without at least guidance, or more importantly, a framework + docs on how to utilize Signals at scale, you'll just end up with a random mess. Still, it's awesome how far they've come, and it's neat to see them still innovating years later.

Restify.js: Future of Node.js REST development

Express GraphQL is a library for building production ready GraphQL HTTP middleware. Despite the emphasis on Express in the repo name, you can create a GraphQL HTTP server with any HTTP web framework that supports connect styled middleware. This includes Connect itself, Express and Restify.

Is express still the go-to HTTP server? How are hapi and restify doing? Has koa ever really picked up? Is there any new cool stuff to watch out for (fastify, anyone)?

Restify - No native support yet. Support merged mid-2020, scheduled for a v9 release.

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.