There has never been a better time to be a full-stack developer. The tooling and frameworks available to developers today enable them to build complex applications with quicker to-market times and small teams. However, the prevalence of this tooling comes at the expense of understanding how the pieces fit together to achieve this feat. That’s what this book aims to accomplish: showing you how to build full-stack GraphQL applications with graph databases.

GraphQL is a language for defining and querying your data. It’s also a runtime server to parse that language and produce meaningful JSON results. Its strong type system means reduced probability of errors in the transaction between your application, your API, and the database. GraphQL’s new approach to building APIs allows you to specify what data is available in the API and allows the client to select exactly the data needed with each request—reducing the number of requests to your database and increasing the performance of your application. It’s not surprising that usage of GraphQL increased from 13 percent in 2017 to 47 percent in 2020, when you consider its advantages including:

• Over-fetching results in sending less data over the wire
• Under-fetching provides everything the client needs in a single request
• Simplified data fetching with component-based data interactions
• Graphs all the way down” means GraphQL helps unify disparate systems and focuses API interactions on relationships instead of resources

• Powerful libraries, such as Relay or Apollo, at your disposal that have features contributing to scalability of big projects, performance, and efficiency