Building Modern APIs: A Guide to GraphQL with Spring Boot

source: viralpatel.net

Understanding GraphQL: The Basics

Before we dive into implementation, let’s understand what GraphQL is and why it has become so popular. Imagine you’re at a restaurant. With a traditional REST API, you get a fixed meal — you get everything that comes on the plate, whether you want it or not. But with GraphQL, you’re ordering exactly what you want from the menu — no more, no less. This is the main idea behind GraphQL.

GraphQL, created by Facebook in 2012 and released publicly in 2015, is a query language for APIs. It lets clients specify exactly what data they need, avoiding the common problem of getting too much or too little information from an API.

Why Choose GraphQL?

Let’s look at a real-world example. Suppose you’re building a blog application. With a traditional REST API, to get a blog post and its author’s information, you might need to make two separate API calls:

GET /api/posts/123
GET /api/users/456

With GraphQL, you can get all this information in a single query:

query {
  post(id: "123") {
    title
    content
    author {
      name
      email
    }
  }
}

Setting Up GraphQL with Spring Boot