Spring GDS 25th Anniversary
A logistics company that ships to 190 countries built something to ship to itself.
GraphQL
What is GraphQL?
GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for executing those queries, developed by Meta and open-sourced in 2015. It offers an alternative to REST by letting clients ask for exactly the data they need, no more and no less.
The difference from REST is structural. In a REST API, each endpoint returns a fixed shape, so getting everything a screen needs often means hitting several endpoints and discarding parts of each response. GraphQL typically exposes a single endpoint, and the client describes the shape of the response inside the query itself. That removes over-fetching, where you receive data you never use, and under-fetching, where one request is not enough. A mobile screen showing a user's name, last three orders, and loyalty points can fetch precisely those fields in one round trip instead of three. A strongly typed schema sits underneath, documenting the API and powering tooling like autocomplete and validation, and it lets the API evolve by adding fields without breaking the queries clients already rely on.
GraphQL earns its keep on products with complex, interconnected data or several clients consuming one backend. A web app, a mobile app, and a partner integration can each query the same graph for the slice they need, which is harder to coordinate when every client depends on fixed REST responses.
GraphQL at Dallonses
When a product has rich data and more than one client pulling from it, GraphQL is often the cleaner foundation. We reach for it where a single, well-typed graph saves a web app and a mobile app from each negotiating their own endpoints, and where the schema becomes living documentation the whole team trusts.
It fits how we approach API integration and an API-first build, where the contract between backend and frontend is defined early and held to. That discipline lets clients add new surfaces later, a partner integration or a new app, without rewriting the layer underneath.
Got data feeding several apps and tired of endpoint sprawl? Let's design the graph.
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