swapi-graphql VS GraphQLite

My first introduction to GraphQL was roughly 7 years ago, about a year after it was initially announced by Facebook. My first taste was using the "SWAPI," The Star Wars API, GraphQL wrapper that the team at Facebook created. You can view the source code for it here. It was an eye-opening experience, GraphQL felt like a game changer, but I only had an excuse to use it once joining Amplication.

Other GraphQL clients offer similar functionality for testing and interacting with a GraphQL API, but this article places greater emphasis on using GraphQL Playground. To test our queries, we will work with the StarWars API.

Have you ever used graphql and more specifically graphiql?

Before getting started we need to find a working GraphQL SWAPI endpoint. The official repo is only for setting up our own server (which is nice to have), but if we don't want to set up a demo server, then we need a ready to use endpoint.

Single backend server (using GraphQLite)

For more details, please check the GraphQLite.com site.

There are probably million other ways to demonstrate how a SWAPI GraphQL endpoint can be accessed from an iOS app, but this is our version. You can check the full source code here.

If you prefer to make changes in the local database while the device is offline, and would like these changes to be synced automatically to the server (once the network connection is back live), then we need to set up Sync Engine.

With these code extensions, the device's local database (and the user interface) will be updated automatically by the server-side changes. You can check the full source code here.

Let's save the necessary Mutations and Queries into an appsync.graphql file, so we can simply use them in the codebase just referring to their names.

And pretty much that's all we need for the first working demo app. You can check the full source code here.

To solve all these issues, we have implemented GraphQLite. We believe this could be a solution for most of the database (local and remote) related challenges we are facing with. It might be the first step towards our goals being achieved.