Migrating to GraphQL: A Practical Assessment Gleison Brito, Thais Mombach, Marco Tulio Valente ASERG Group, Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil fgleison.brito, thaismombach,
[email protected] Abstract—GraphQL is a novel query language proposed by in the number of fields of the documents returned by servers? Facebook to implement Web-based APIs. In this paper, we (RQ5) When using GraphQL, what is the reduction in the size present a practical study on migrating API clients to this new of the documents returned by servers? To answer RQ1 and technology. First, we conduct a grey literature review to gain an in-depth understanding on the benefits and key characteristics RQ2, we conduct a grey literature review, covering 28 popular normally associated to GraphQL by practitioners. After that, we Web articles (mostly blog posts) about GraphQL. Since the assess such benefits in practice, by migrating seven systems to query language has just two years, we focus on grey literature, use GraphQL, instead of standard REST-based APIs. As our key instead of analysing scientific papers, as usually recommended result, we show that GraphQL can reduce the size of the JSON for emerging technologies [6]–[8]. As a result, we confirmed documents returned by REST APIs in 94% (in number of fields) and in 99% (in number of bytes), both median results. two key characteristics of GraphQL: (a) support to an hierar- Index Terms—GraphQL, REST, APIs, Migration Study chical data model, which can contribute to reduce the number of endpoints accessed by clients; (b) support to client-specific I.