How REST and GraphQL Draw the API Boundary

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 10:00:00 +0900

From the front end, a profile screen on a code-hosting service looks simple: show a user’s name, list a few of their repositories, and include each one’s star count. The API boundary decides where that screen gets assembled, and REST and GraphQL draw it in different places.

REST is the established, widely familiar style for building web application programming interfaces (APIs); GraphQL, publicly released by Facebook in 2015 and adopted more widely in the years since, is a newer alternative built on a different premise. Lining the two up as rival techniques is tempting, but they are not defined at the same layer: Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style, a set of constraints on how a client and server exchange representations of resources over a protocol such as HTTP,¹ while GraphQL is a query language and runtime in which a typed schema describes what a service can return and each request states which parts it wants. Here, REST means the resource-oriented HTTP style common in API design discussions, not every possible interpretation of Fielding’s constraints or every way to model resources over HTTP.

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How REST and GraphQL Draw the API Boundary