wundergraph VS tailcall

I never really got graphql until I stumbled upon Wundergraph. (https://github.com/wundergraph/wundergraph). I have no affiliation with them except that I have been building an app with it. I'm honestly puzzled how it's not more popular. Maybe people are solving these problems in other ways? But I tried out a bunch of stuff: Vapor, Supabase, Hasura, etc. None of it simplifies building complex systems the way WG does.

I think their takes on graphql make sense: https://wundergraph.com/blog/graphql_is_not_meant_to_be_expo...

To demonstrate field usage metrics in Federation, I’ll be using WunderGraph Cosmo — a fully open source, fully self-hostable platform for Federation V1/V2 that is a drop in replacement for Apollo GraphOS.

The inverse is also true. As a technical founder, and maybe even an introvert like me, you should definitely look for a non-technical co-founder who can help you with networking, etc... I found my dream co-founder through YC Co-founder match and what can I say, it's going great. We're focusing on enterprise GraphQL/API solutions (https://wundergraph.com) and I benefit from the networking and communication abilities of Stefan, while I answer all technical questions. Tldr, I highly recommend to team up with people who complement your skills.

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.

I'm a big fan of tRPC. It's amazing how it pushed TypeScript only stacks to the limit in terms of DX. Additionally, it made the GraphQL community aware of the limitations and tradeoffs of the Query language. At the same time, I think tRPC went through a really fast hype cycle and it doesn't look like we're seeing a massive move away from REST and GraphQL to RPC. That said, we see a lot of interest in RPC these days as we've adopted some ideas from tRPC and the old NextJS. In our BFF framework (https://wundergraph.com/) we've combined file based routing with RPC. In addition to tRPC, we're automatically generating a JSON Schema for each operation and an OpenAPI spec for the whole set of operations. People quite like this approach because you can easily share a set of RPC endpoints as an OpenAPI spec or postman collection. In addition, there are no discussions around HTTP verbs and such, there's only really queries, mutations and subscriptions. I'm curious what other people's experiences are with GraphQL, REST and RPC style APIs? What are you using these days and how many people/teams are involved/using your apis?

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Actually, you might want to check out https://tailcall.run (Disclaimer: I am the core maintainer of the project)

It's an open-source API Orchestrator, in other words "a Zapier for APIs". If you find it interesting, hit our discord channel to learn more about it.

Tailcall is building something similar in that regard. The idea is to allow developers to specify their orchestration requirements using a DSL and then behind the scenes generate an ultra high performance backend for GraphQL. The query could span over REST, GRPC and other GraphQL services. Check it out — https://github.com/tailcallhq/tailcall

GraphQL will save you from embarrassing errors on the client and improve performance for sure. My recommendation is — Build API and expose them using REST or GRPC. Use a solution like https://tailcall.run/ to create a GraphQL facade on top of it for your clients to consume.

layer by hand? Have you tried https://github.com/tailcallhq/tailcall

With tailcall, you can quickly bootstrap a GraphQL service on top of existing APIs. I would love to collaborate on this and help you on board.

Hi, I am the founder of https://tailcall.run. I have personally built and used GraphQL at a massive scale (100M rpm, 1K APIs, 100s services). I believe have a fair understanding of the problem it solves, as well as its pitfalls. We built Tailcall because we realized that manually writing a GraphQL service is inefficient and doesn't scale well. Our main learning was that APIs should be built and operated independently, regardless of how they are consumed.

GraphQL should also be considered as a client-side abstraction and architecturally positioned closer to the client than to the server. In this context, the client could be a mobile app, a website, or even another service querying data from an external or internal data source. As a client-side abstraction, the responsibility of maintenance should lie with the consumer of the APIs, not the producer. All these learnings have helped us architect Tailcall as it is today. Tailcall provides a DSL that allows consumers of the API to configure how they would want the schema to look. Behind the scenes, Tailcall automatically orchestrates the APIs to generate a unified graphQL endpoint. Once configured it can be deployed on a typical server, but semantically still being a piece of the client/API Consumer.

This way of looking at graphQL considers federation as an anti-pattern. GraphQL Federation pushes graphQL towards the server side or more specifically the API producer. This new layer of abstraction also adds significant levels of slowness & complexity in architecture. We started with the problem of clients consuming APIs and the need to compose them, but ended up using a solution that's composing "Graphs". That's not necessarily wrong, but it feels like an overkill for the core problem the organization starts with which is — API Composition.

However, we understand that this might not be relatable for smaller organizations and various others who have been working with GraphQL for a long or probably have a different take on it. I would love to hear your thoughts!

Some of the questions we had were —

Do you prefer to handwrite a graphQL API or, use an open-source solution that could auto-generate a GraphQL endpoint on top of your existing API?

What are your thoughts on GraphQL in general — like, hate, neutral? Does it solve a big problem in your company? Have you tried TRPC as an alternative?

Do you think federation is the future? Based on what you learned, do you think Tailcall is a good design?

Have you considered using https://tailcall.run