A platform-as-a-service company is only as good as its APIs, andShopifyhas dozens of them.
Sure, theyre still human-comprehendible languages.
You could argue that theyre more beautiful or poetic than English.
But still, theyre different, and come with an inherent learning curve.
Shopifys decision to switch to GraphQL, therefore, is a radical one.
What on earth is GraphQL?
Helping me out isAvi Flombaum, Co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Flatiron School, a WeWork company.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
GraphQL is a standard for how applications can interact with each other over data, Flombaum explained.
Its a format for API requests.
Skinner hastened to add that theres no such thing as a silver bullet with API design.
Despite its benefits, GraphQL itself presents a series of trade-offs, he explained.
I wanted to know why Shopify was taking such a radical step.
We spent 14 years building a company where we put APIs first.
Right, but that only underlines my main point: APIs are essential to Shopify.
[In 2015] we were looking at redoing our mobile experience.
We were looking at performance.
We were looking at ease-of-use.
You know, you get a graphical explorer with the language.
The tooling is great, explained Lemieux.
The initial push towards GraphQL came internally, from Shopifys development team.
But it does have one major drawback: its origins.
As mentioned GraphQL was originally developed internally at Facebook.
To be frank, in 2015 I was a little concerned.
Lee is unabashedly nerdy, and her eyes lit up when we started taking about APIs.
I wanted to know exactly how the company plans to transition its users towards the new GraphQL endpoints.
Nodes and edges arent fully natural when youre switching from a table-based understanding, admitted Lee.
Youre probably have libraries that scaffold like above that, which youre making method calls through, she explained.
Theres also Python libraries and PHP libraries that we updated, Lee said.
In one common use-case, the company has gone from making 11 API requests to just one.
During our interview, I probed her about this.
By moving to GraphQL, customers of a Shopify site should enjoy shorter load times.
Developers will also find it easier to stay within their API limits, as theyre making fewer requests.
That being said, I cant help but imagine Shopify will benefit massively from the switch to GraphQL.
This presumably means that Shopify will spend less on bandwidth, shuffling bits between its servers and its customers.
And thats before we factor in the fact that Shopify will be servicing fewer API requests overall.
Unfortunately, they couldnt tell me anything concrete.
One thing is concrete though: GraphQL is a big deal, and its only getting bigger.
Developers, if you fail to learn it, you do so at your own peril.
