2017 AIM HDC

We have higher expectations of our APIs than ever before. API servers need to be able to communicate with thick clients, web frontends, and mobile devices, and the needs of each client can vary considerably. Reducing network calls and being able to query for exactly the data you need are key to simplifying client-side development and keeping things fast. However, many apps are reasoning with complex graphs of data, the relationships of which are sometimes expressed poorly over REST. Fetching related pieces of data can require many interactions between the client and server and, most of the time, many facets of that data aren’t needed for the immediate view.

At Hudl, we’re moving from our humble beginnings as a coaching tool for high school football programs into a world-class app used across the globe by the likes of the English Premier League and the NBA. We’re reimagining how our data should be expressed to best serve all our markets, and we’ve adopted GraphQL as a new means of querying our data - and all its complex relationships - over our API. GraphQL is an open-source query language developed by Facebook that enables efficient and declarative querying of data. In this talk, I’ll present an overview of the technology, how it compares to its REST counterpart, and the benefits we’ve seen (as well as the pitfalls we’ve encountered) in the transition to this new technology.