Better guide & educate customer choice in API - collect of case studies of where choice of REST vs GraphQL improved customer efficiency
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About
GraphQL has functional advantages over REST for retrieving complex related data in fewer requests, REST has functional advantages over GraphQL in terms of caching and other performance optimisations for more flattened data.
The decision between REST or GraphQL is pitched/understood as a pure technology choice which is limiting our customer’s ability to make best choices.
We don't do a good enough job to provide customers with guidance around this, most likely leading to sub-optimal API performance experiences.
Proposal
Based on real-life examples, form documentation to better support customer decision-making when selecting REST vs GraphQL API to integrate with.
Collection of case studies
Add below collection of case studies as we find them.
- Internal GitLab tooling shifted from REST to GraphQL for data for Roulette https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-roulette/-/merge_requests/135. Because of this change, we reduced more than 1000 network requests that were previously needed to retrieve user information down to only 6