In this blog, we walk through a project to build a personal playlist exporter that migrates playlists off of Spotify. It involves setting up the Spotify OAuth flow in Remix and transforming multi-call REST sequences into concise, single-call GraphQL requests.
Announcing StepZen's Postman Collection of pre-built SaaS APIs provided in the StepZen GraphQL Studio!
What's new with StepZen this month? PlanetScale integration, a new community tutorial, StepZen for federation, and a sneak peek for product updates. Here's the roll-up.
This tutorial describes how to use StepZen to transform two REST endpoints from the AlpacaDB Trading API and build a single GraphQL endpoint. Then learn how to consume that GraphQL endpoint in Svelte to create a personal stock trading app.
Leo makes the case for supporting generic error codes in the GraphQL spec, arguing that it would help enforce the correctness of all required validations by GraphQL servers. And in preparation for doing the work, he tracks down all the errors that can be produced.
Learn how to use StepZen to execute queries conditionally and avoid making unnecessary requests.
PlanetScale is one of the most popular cloud-based, serverless databases with MySQL support. Using StepZen you can get an instant GraphQL API for your PlanetScale database, that gets deployed for you in the cloud.
Our customers often have data lakes or data warehouses — one place where analytical workloads are executed against a global truth of data. Many have a master data management (MDM) strategy for "slower moving data." But data lakes and MDMs are not the whole story. A GraphQL data layer — a graph of graphs — can help you achieve a single global truth for all your data.
It is possible to build a GraphQL system where both the setup and the execution of interactions are declarative. This blog describes how building subgraphs and composing a supergraph from them can all be done declaratively - leading to simpler and cleaner code to write and maintain, and delivering all the benefits of a better runtime.
The information I've gathered from the spec includes what is described there and also what is not there (but we could reasonably expect). I've also retrieved some information from GraphQL's GitHub repo, where we can appreciate what features are currently missing in GraphQL and which ones will eventually be supported.
What's new with StepZen this month? Web3, HarperDB integration, converting REST APIs to GraphQL from your terminal, etc. Here's the roll-up.
Web3 community members are Twitter-crazed and Discord-server fanatics, and everyone in the community cannot get enough of it. The craze started with Bitcoin, then the broader crypto networks, and now the technology building around these decentralized networks termed "web3".
HarperDB is a SQL- and NoSQL-based database that you can access using their REST API, but by using StepZen you can query HarperDB using GraphQL instead. With just a few commands from the StepZen CLI you can transform the HarperDB REST API into GraphQL, as you'll learn in this post.
Getting your API into a production-ready state means taking several things into account, like pagination, performance, security. StepZen helps you create and deploy a GraphQL API for any datasource quickly and scalably.
This article explores the roles that GraphQL can play in a microservices architecture. You can save your organization time adopting GraphQL for every microservice. GraphQL can be the data layer (or API gateway) that serves as the communication layer between microservices . . .
A new PR on the GraphQL spec will bring support for directives on directives. Its motivation: to enable us to use directives @deprecate and @specifiedBy also on directives. This blog explores other potential use cases for directives that transform the behavior of an existing directive.
Learn to convert a REST endpoint into a deployed GraphQL API in one command.
Database systems use declarations that make the experience of both the setup and interactive side amazing. In contrast, most GraphQL systems make only the interactive side declarative. The setup side is complex, and worse, the execution of interactions is suboptimal. This blog explores how it is possible to build a GraphQL system where both sides are declarative.
Developing animated layouts for a web app can require a lot of browser reloads to get things right and that can cause quota-expensive queries. In this post we explore using Remix, Framer, and StepZen to develop layout animations without blowing past API quotas.
Performance is an important issue for APIs. It's well understood that user engagement with an application drops quickly with increases in latency. This blog explores the important metrics for GraphQL APIs, and introduces a GraphQL Benchmark tool that will help you track your GraphQL performance.
Prompted by an interesting question on the GraphQL subreddit, this blog explores whether it's possible to tell the GraphQL server to flatten the shape of a response. And, if so, how to do it?
What's new with StepZen this month? An updated "getting started" experience, new features for your StepZen dashboard, mocking capabilities, and more. Here's the roll-up.
Learn how to use StepZen’s @mock directive to create a frontend development workflow.
Handling in-person events usually involve "busy work"; a back-and-forth exchange between attendees and organizers. "Busy work" is tedious and prone to human error. The goal of this application is to limit the back-and-forth of organizers with attendees while still maintaining a secure and quick event check-in process.
This blog explores how to build a custom GraphQL API using MongoDB Atlas’ Data API and another REST service. You can get the ease of the built-in GraphQL API with the flexibility of the hand-coded GraphQL API and build a custom MongoDB GraphQL API without having to write and maintain code.
Announcing the launch of a simplified Getting Started Experience. With a quick-start wizard and in just three commands you can quickly turn your database or REST endpoint into a GraphQL API running securely on StepZen’s highly performant, globally distributed service.
SvelteKit is a new Svelte metaframework for building web applications with filesystem-based routing. It is inspired by Next.js and is well suited for connecting to a GraphQL endpoint built and running on StepZen. In this example we build a blog using SvelteKit, StepZen, and the DEV API.
How best to hook up a GraphQL endpoint to a Remix app, preferably with no external dependencies? That's the question I set out to answer with this project. With a few tricks culled from recent tutorials by GraphQL blogger Jamie Barton, JS live-streamer Jason Lengstorf, and advanced FE YouTuber Jack Herrington, I was surprised to learn how little time and code it takes to make it happen.
The GraphQL ecosystem is maturing and adoption accelerating. Developers have choices - tools and libraries that solve different sets of problems or solve problems in different ways. Let's explore a few.
One of the main features of the GraphQL specification is its type system, including nullability. Nullability is important in the type system of GraphQL as it determines whether a field can be null or non-nullable.
Learn about the upcoming oneof input object in GraphQL. See how useful it will become for simplifying schemas by making queries more powerful.
StepZen’s JSON2SDL tool transforms a JSON response into GraphQL by generating a schema in GraphQL’s Schema Definition Language. In this example, we’ll look at JSON responses from the Stripe API and convert them into GraphQL schemas.
Is it possible to check if a value returned by a GraphQL query is empty or not? This article explains how to tackle this problem in GraphQL.
Moving from a traditional API architecture like REST towards GraphQL can be a challenge. When moving to GraphQL using StepZen, you can make this straightforward while also leveraging the investments in your current REST APIs.
There are several resources advising best practices for designing schemas for GraphQL APIs. These will lead us most of the way in the design of the schema, but often we may also bump into issues that are not generic. This article describes what to consider for several decisions the author had to make when designing a GraphQL API.
GraphQL directives add additional configuration to GraphQL schemas. If you use them with an eye to reducing the amount of code you have to write, you can save time and effort. In this article we explain why we gravitate towards them.
In combining data from Spotify and Google's Knowledge Graph API using StepZen's @materializer directive, we encounter a common headache with mixed APIs: their diversity of authorization requirements. In this post, Joey illustrates a simple way to handle the basic Client Credentials Flow using a different custom directive - @sequence.
GraphQL is the perfect technology to bring your microservices together. With StepZen you can create this datalayer in a declaritive way using GraphQL directives, without having to write any resolvers.
Federation and schema stitching are some of the terms used for describing how GraphQL APIs can be combined into a unified layer. This article explores what’s needed to build a unified GraphQL layer, and the various approaches to building the federation layer that many businesses need in order to optimize build-time and runtime for developers and teams.
A common problem in API design is how to make the needs of backend and frontend developers meet. We explore how GraphQL and StepZen make this easier.
When a GraphQL schema is static (i.e. it doesn't change based on runtime conditions), there is a performance gain to be had by caching the results of an introspection query the first time it's accessed, and retrieving the cached response from then on. This blog describes how to produce this cache by routing the request through a CDN.
StepZen is proud to partner with Google Cloud to enable next-generation API Management for GraphQL. Together we provide the best approach for developers to build and manage GraphQL and REST APIs - a set of building blocks, assembled, and delivered as-a-service.
With StepZen's pre-built schemas for Spotify and Knowledge Graph APIs, and a custom GraphQL directive (@materializer), this mashup takes advantage of the knowledge base of 500B+ facts on 5B+ entities to add album, artist, and track descriptions in fields in a Spotify_Track schema. The new fields fill themselves with data from the Knowledge Graph using StepZen’s @materializer directive.
Spend a few minutes a day from Dec 1-25 to learn to build an API with StepZen, consume it from a Next frontend, and deploy it to Netlify!
The GraphQL Working Group is tackling union of scalars as inputs, under RFC: GraphQL Input Union, as the first step in supporting dynamic settings in GraphQL. Here our guest blogger, Leo, explores ways to handle dynamic settings while we wait for the RFC: GraphQL Input Union to be resolved.
GraphQL APIs are excellent for frontend developers, providing acceleration for application development and an improved developer experience. However, new challenges for the security of these APIs arise. Here we explore finding the right balance for GraphQL API technology on a continuum between safety and progress.
Learn how to use StepZen's JSON2SDL tool. Paste JSON in, copy SDL out.
In this example, we use Google's Cloud Natural Language API and the Dev.to API to analyze the sentiment of blog comments.
Eliminate the pain of re-coding your portfolio site every time it needs an update by using StepZen's dynamic, low-code solution that deploys to Netlify.
Announcing the launch of StepZen GraphQL Studio. This intuitive and streamlined GraphQL IDE delivers a suite of popular and useful APIs that StepZen has transformed into flexible GraphQL schemas that can be used individually or in combinations, and makes GraphQL significantly easier to adopt and use for any size project.
With StepZen and Postman workspaces side-by-side, I was able to achieve something remarkable: a localhost and live endpoint serving custom-aggregated YouTube-Data-as-GraphQL, after barely a day-and-a-half of experimentation.
Handling event listeners and DOM tracking in a react application. React Hooks take control of state management, and when implemented properly, can empower a product team to analyze features and functionality of a web platform with ease.
There are different ways to bring together GraphQL microservices, like schema stitching and Federation. But these solutions aren't the most optimal when you want to create a data layer or gateway for GraphQL. Instead, StepZen offers a true SDL-first approach that works for all microservices.
We'll look at API design and how to create a clean API. This theme has roots in the early days of REST API design and continues through GraphQL API design. Let's take a look at how a GraphQL layer can be a mode of communication, as well as a way to martial multiple endpoints. You'll also learn a few pointers on creating clean GraphQL APIs in general.
GraphQL APIs are excellent for frontend developers, providing acceleration for application development and an improved developer experience. However, new challenges for the security of these APIs arise. Here we explore finding the right balance for GraphQL API technology on a continuum between safety and progress.
GraphQL and microservices architectures are perfectly compatible. You can use GraphQL as a data layer and combine data from all these services into one universal API. And StepZen can be used as this API data layer.
Learn what it means for GraphQL to be a runtime under the hood.
Documentation is important to make your API understandable to your users. Writing documentation for GraphQL APIs is a bit different, as you'll learn in this article.
There are many different flavors in creating the perfect GraphQL server, ranging from SDL-first to code-first or even generated solutions. This article explores different approaches and a solution to create a GraphQL API without writing any code.
You can always read docs; make SQL, cURL, or GraphQL calls; and learn the backend capabilities by trying them. Why bother about introspection? It is the way for a program to build something extraordinary on top of it. It could be Swagger docs, GraphiQL, a database optimization program, a change management tool, or another programmatic approach.
Our guest blogger Leo is back to explore a hot topic around GraphQL directives. Looking at how directives are cateorized as query-type or schema-type and how important their functionalities are. So let's discuss the pros and cons and query-type directives that modify return values.
Sometimes we need to mix and match data from CMSs and other data sources. With StepZen, you can easily mix data from an external CMS with your own project by incorporating StepZen’s custom directives.
You can send a GraphQL query on stepzen.com/stickers and receive awesome swag-- learn how we built the page!
In this post, we learn how to allow an application to use two different GraphQL servers in a similar fashion. We adapt an application based on WPGraphQL to also work with the plugin GraphQL API for WordPress. This task involves adapting all field names and parameters in the GraphQL queries, converting from WPGrapQL's to the GraphQL API for WP's schema.
Learn about the GitHub repositories we've opened up to Hacktoberfest 2021 contributions.
Learn how to add a GraphQL API and a MySQL database to your StepZen data layer.
In a recent episode of "Learn With Jason", StepZen's Carlos Eberhardt and Netlify's Jason Lengstorf discussed the pros and cons of GraphQL for developers, and showed us how StepZen works to easily let you build a GraphQL API on a number of data sources!
GraphiQL provides an editor to compose GraphQL queries, and a way to visualize the response, and browse the schema. In this article, Leonardo Losoviz explores some clever ways to modify the content inside the GraphiQL editor via JavaScript, allowing website visitors to execute a different GraphQL query by clicking an HTML button.
As the backend developer or API provider, you do not want just to build out APIs, you want to build out APIs that are intuitive and easy to explore, test drive and learn. Here we argue that GraphQL is the right solution, not just for the frontend developer, but for the people whose jobs are to corral and carefully expose backends.
The expiration of access tokens is a security feature of the OAuth Authorization process. Using a custom GraphQL directive, StepZen lets developers continously keeping these tokens secure and up to date.
To speed app development, the divide between the frontend and the backend must be bridged. Databases providing GraphQL interfaces will bridge a part of the divide. But a middleware that speaks GraphQL on the top and native languages on the bottom will round out the solution.
How to build a GraphQL API that uses StepZen's custom rest, dbquery and sequence directives to complete a complex sequence of queries within in a single GraphQL query request.
Using the export directive to pass dynamic data from one query to the next and manipulate it in order to complete a complex sequence of requests via a single GraphQL query.
Create a Login UI/UX experience with the Google Sign-In API on a React Native mobile app. Once a user successfully logs in, we are writing a mutation in StepZen to pass the login credentials to FaunaDB.
While databases are still a critical part of the application stack, there is a gap between the way data is provided and the way frontend applications want to consume it. GraphQL can bridge that gap by being a middle layer between the frontend and the backend.
Implementing GraphQL doesn't mean abandoning your REST ecosystem-- far from it! Learn how adding a GraphQL layer capitalizes on the power of REST.
GraphQL is flexible enough to allow for some creative solutions. In this article, Leonardo Losoviz explores some out-of-the-box ways to use GraphQL for resource based endpoints, schema stitching and manipulating content.
StepZen's custom sequence directive allows for multiple queries to be executed in a sequence, one after the other to return a single result. In this example we will see how to use the sequence directive to query three APIs.
Learn how to add any GraphQL API to your StepZen data layer, by autogenerating your GraphQL schemas and deploying them to your StepZen endpoint.
Tips for mapping an existing application's data model into a GraphQL schema, using WordPress as an example.
Learn how to layer a GraphQL API, accessible via a StepZen endpoint, on your MySQL database.
GraphQL allows frontend developers to interact using their concepts and for the GraphQL layer to mediate with the backend implementations. GraphQL as the frontend API, as well as a few other constructs — interfaces, routing, and declarative specifications — give developers the tools to leverage the powerful backend-for-frontend pattern for decoupling.
There are some very promising proposals to improve the GraphQL spec under consideration. Leonardo Losoviz takes a deeper look at five of the most promising ones and what they'd mean for the future of GraphQL.
Here, we show you how to use fragments to clean up repeated code in your GraphQL schema.
Learn what scalar types are in GraphQL and what custom GraphQL scalar types StepZen provides to you.
An interview with Eve Porcello, who shares her view on the state of GraphQL and the JAMstack.
One of GraphQL's key benefits over REST is the ways that improves the developer experience. This post explores the key benefits GraphQL offers over REST in terms of developer experience.
Learn how to use StepZen and GraphQL mutations to generate QR Codes with Google Sheets.
GraphQL directives are one of GraphQL's most powerful features, enabling custom capabilities that are not yet supported by the GraphQL spec, and offering a glimpse of what GraphQL may look like in the future.
The usual debate is REST versus GraphQL, but are the two really that different after all? Let's look at the similarities and differences to understand which is best for your project.
Frontend developers are asked to build engaging online experiences. They need data from the backends. They must perform actions against backends. GraphQL APIs are fast becoming the language of modern app development. But who builds those APIs? Are they built quickly or are frontend developers left waiting? Who runs and manages the APIs?
To build today's web apps, you likely need data from a database. At the same time, GraphQL is playing an increasingly important role in modernizing data access to accelerate web development. See how your GraphQL view of your data can match the implementation - a set of database tables and joins.
Walk through how to use two popular GraphQL clients, GraphiQL and GraphQL Voyager, via screenshots to explore their features and usage.
GraphQL directives are a powerful aspect of the GraphQL spec that you may not even be aware of. They provide extensibility to to a GraphQL API. This post looks at what GraphQL directives are, how they are used and some examples of directives in use.
Along with the mintbean.io team, we wrapped a GraphQL:Learn 'n Hack Hackathon last week. Developers had a blast building with GraphQL and we loved working with everybody. Here are some of the projects that developers built.
Here, we give you an in-depth look at how you can easily use StepZen to connect your MySQL database to a GraphQL API.
A step-by-step guide demonstrating how to build a GraphQL API that pulls from multiple REST endpoints using StepZen.
APIs are a powerful way to fetch and combine data during static and dynamic builds. We believe that the potential of APIs in Jamstack applications is fully realized when APIs are easy to build and run and help developers seamlessly harmonize multiple data sources.
How to build a React frontend from scratch and query a GraphQL API with Apollo Client
What does a developer need to think through when deciding whether to build, own, and operate a GraphQL API service?
Let's explore the BFF pattern, how it applies to Jamstack applications and how to make it easier to implement.
Exploring three popular GraphQL JavaScript client libraries that you can use to connect to a GraphQL API in the browser or in Node.js.
We've added new capabilities that make it easy to connect your GraphQL endpoint with any REST data source, using the @rest directive.
A look at the intertwined evolution of the Jamstack and GraphQL and how popular Jamstack tools are built upon a GraphQL foundation.
A step-by-step guide to building a custom GraphQL API using StepZen that connects to a real MySQL backend.
A GraphQL query is just a standard HTTP request, no special libraries needed. Let's look at how to create one in JavaScript and Node.js.
Wouldn't it be great if it were as easy to create a GraphQL API from a Google Sheet as it is to share a Google Sheet with someone?
GraphQL queries are what allow GraphQL to be efficient in how it gets data, by allowing you to express only what you need but also exactly everything you need. In this post, we'll see how.
GraphQL is a relatively new technology but it offers enormous benefits over the traditional RESTful solutions for frontend and backend developers.