GraphQL is an open source technology created by Facebook that is getting a fair bit of attention of late. It is set to make a major impact on how APIs are designed. GraphQL is primarily about designing your APIs more effectively, and being more specific about access to your data sources.

So what about Facebook? It built GraphQL because it needed something powerful enough to describe Facebook’s API structure, but easy to learn by mobile developers. It is seeing billions of API calls a day now, so we know it scales. As Facebook points out, the shape of the query mirrors the shape of the response, which is cool.

In summary GraphQL maps pretty well to new API-driven models such as serverless. Michael Unger from Neo4j feels REST is worth retiring. That said, technologies don’t die overnight. REST is hardly going to disappear overnight. But for a class of problems for high scale sites it’s we’re going to see significant adoption of GraphQL. Google Trends shows growing interest in GraphQL and gRPC. GraphQL maps to external consumption of APIs, with gRPC for internal. They’re both clearly spiking in interest.