What to expect at GraphQL Conf 2019

GraphQL Conf is rapidly approaching! On June 20th and 21st, GraphQL fans from across the globe will gather in Berlin for all things GraphQL! Here’s a sneak peak!

Spanning two days, GraphQL Conf highlights use cases, lessons learned, and GraphQL development stories from across the entire ecosystem. This year, a couple of specific themes are especially prominent at the conference: SDL-first vs Code-first, type safety, and GraphQL schema distribution.

In addition to a packed conference schedule, attendees will get to hear a variety of perspectives on how best to put these themes into practice.

SDL-first & code-first development

Last year at GraphQL Europe two talks took opposite approaches on the question of monolith vs microservices. This year, the opportunity to see two approaches contrasted continues with talks that take a position on SDL-first vs Code-first development.

The discussion of which approach is most effective can be nuanced, and GraphQL Conf provides an introduction to the conversation. Attendees can also gather additional context about the discussion in the Prisma series on GraphQL Nexus.

SDL as an Artifact: Code-First Schemas and GraphQL Nexus (by Tim Griesser)

Schema-first (SDL) development is common in the JS ecosystem, yet isn’t in most other languages. Why? What if we challenged this ‘best practice’ with something even better — a library with a declarative API and full type safety out of the box — without needing manual type-annotation (even in JS)!

Introducing Tartiflette: “SDL First” implementation built for Python 3.6+ (by Stan Chollet)

Tartiflette is a brand new GraphQL Implementation built with and for python 3.6+, based on dailymotion’s experience of running a GraphQL API in production for 2,5 years. We will discover some of the interesting features provided by the SDL First approach of the Tartiflette Engine.

Making GraphQL applications type-safe

Type safety has emerged as another key point of discussion this year. Type safety has helped developers write safer code, keep their data in sync, and get additional benefits like autocompletion. Individuals curious about getting starting with type-safe code will be able to use tools like the upcoming Yoga 2.

In the same vein, at the conference, attendees will have the chance to hear from experts in the space explaining what impact type safety can have.

Yoga — Building Type-Safe GraphQL Servers Without Boilerplate (by Nikolas Burk)

The Yoga framework enables building fully type-safe GraphQL servers with a Ruby-on-Rails-like developer experience. Yoga follows a code-first approach and makes it easy to connect your resolvers to a database via Prisma. Yoga is lightweight, values conventions over configuration and comes with a built-in CLI to support common development workflows.

This talk introduces the motivations behind Yoga, compares it to the currently popular “schema-first” approach for GraphQL servers and ends with a live demo of the Yoga framework.

Create Type-Safe Web Applications with ReasonML and GraphQL (by Roy Derks)

ReasonML is a ‘brand new’ syntax based on OCaml and offers a rock-solid type system, which compiles to JavaScript. Together with GraphQLs query language you can create the web application of the future!

Distributing GraphQL schemas

Since GraphQL has been put into production across many companies, there have been many approaches to distributing the GraphQL schema. Options have included schema stitching, schema federation, delegation, and more. GraphQL Conf offers a number of different perspectives on the best approach to handle distributed schemas and developers can get a fuller understanding of what would fit their use case.

Evolving the Graph (by Jon Wong)

Federation. Schema Stitching. Delegation. How can you grow your “graph” in a safe, scalable way? What are the real-world benefits and drawbacks to GraphQL when not all of it is under your control? Hear how the ways we scaled our GraphQL adoption changed over the last three years.

Apollo Schema Federation (by James Baxley)

GraphQL allows organizations to expose their data in a single graph, instead of as independent endpoints that require clients to be aware of service boundaries and to follow relationships between entities manually. Defining and deploying your data graph in a monolithic schema doesn’t scale however. As GraphQL adoption within an organization grows, schema design shifts from being a single team responsibility to being an organization-wide concern. In this talk, I will introduce Apollo schema federation which is the evolution of schema stitching.

So you Want to Distribute your GraphQL Schema? (by Marc Andre-Giroux)

We’ve been hearing a lot on GraphQL being an amazing tool to enable distribution of services and APIs. Schema stitching, API Gateways, namespaces, schema modules; Are we on the right track? Let’s take a deep look at the role of GraphQL in a distributed architecture.

Conclusion

In addition to the seven talks we’ve highlighted, the GraphQL Conf features fourteen, additional, incredible talks on topics ranging from GraphQL and design to real time subscriptions.

Each year the GraphQL community benefits from an additional year of experience, edge-cases, real-world GraphQL experiments. In coming together for GraphQL Conf, we hope folks will be able to share all of that.

See you there soon. 🎉

🎟 Get your GraphQL Conf Ticket!

🤩 Check out the full GraphQL Conf Schedule!

👋 Follow along with all the announcements on Twitter (@theGraphQLConf) or the dedicated #graphql-conf channel in the Prisma Slack!