Between Relay's original release (2015) and re-release (2017), most of the essential patterns for having a good time with GraphQL in the client were first demonstrated. 8 years later and we're finally seeing the lion's share of these available in other clients. - ThreadSky

andrewingram.bsky.social • 62 days ago

Between Relay's original release (2015) and re-release (2017), most of the essential patterns for having a good time with GraphQL in the client were first demonstrated. 8 years later and we're finally seeing the lion's share of these available in other clients.

Comments

andrewingram.bsky.social•62 days ago

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad these ideas are spreading. Despite Relay being by client of choice since the beginning, i've been fairly vocal about my issues with it, and I'm very happy to have choice now. But I am a little baffled by just how slowly its good ideas have spread.

tom.sherman.is•62 days ago

I would love to see a "how do I get the benefits of Relay without using Relay?" blog post

andrewingram.bsky.social•62 days ago

My own opinion is that you still can't, there's still a bunch of cool stuff that doesn't appear to be anywhere else, but we're getting closer. These days i'd say Apollo is a compelling alternative.

calirvine.com•62 days ago

Agree, Apollo gets you most of the way there. Where it falls short is in that Relay has a large pit of success where Apollo you have to know the patterns and do much of it by hand.

jeff.auriemma.xyz•62 days ago

What's the biggest investment we can make toward forming that "pit of success" in Apollo Client, in your estimation?

calirvine.com•62 days ago

I think the pit of success largely comes from the compiler, which also encourages developers to use correct patterns. Everything is possible in Apollo, but it’s manual and you have to know what it is / that it exists in the first place.

calirvine.com•62 days ago

It’s a fundamental difference in approach, I don’t see Apollo becoming more like relay though, it’s good that it fills its own niche. But it requires a team that understands GraphQL well. Almost like spending time working with Relay will make you better with Apollo.

tom.sherman.is•62 days ago

Oh for sure. But showing where things have caught up and where there's still work to do would be super valuable. Especially where it's like: to get this last 5% of DX you need a Relay-like compiler, but 95% of the problem is solved with X

alan.norbauer.com•62 days ago

Since I wrote about the difference in style back in 2023 (https://alan.norbauer.com/articles/relay-style-graphql) Apollo declared “We are taking an initiative this year to change the recommendation to instead prefer fragment composition and fragment colocation … for building apps ...”

https://github.com/apollographql/apollo-client/issues/11666

alan.norbauer.com•62 days ago

tldr: I don’t know any reasonable choice for prod today other than Relay.

Lastly, “benefits of Relay” is a moving target. Relay is the first client to implement any of the semantic nullability stuff like `@catch` (https://relay.dev/docs/guides/catch-directive/) which is *amazing* stuff. @capt.dev

alan.norbauer.com•62 days ago

As far as I know, isograph (https://isograph.dev/docs) is the only other graphql client built with Relay-style graphql ideas in mind from the start. I don’t know if it’s ready for production use yet.

alan.norbauer.com•62 days ago

Apollo’s data masking milestone is closed and the feature shipped, but I don’t know what that means for the project’s overall goal of shifting recommended style of building apps on Apollo.

jeff.auriemma.xyz•62 days ago

Wow, this is the first time I've come across this article and the detail is incredible. Thank you for writing it!

jeff.auriemma.xyz•62 days ago

I think Relay trades flexibility and simplicity and gives users a lot of value in return for that. Apollo Client takes a different tack, one that generally supports anything that's allowed by the spec

jeff.auriemma.xyz•62 days ago

One important detail that often gets lost in the discussion is that Relay is for React apps. If you're not using React, you can't use Relay. Apollo's core APIs mean they can be plugged into the framework of your choice

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply