This is an interesting way to look at it!
I think one missing piece that’s far from mature is data fetching. It’s really hard to get something working well at scale:
- REST is simple, but you end up with serial waterfalls for complex fetches.
- GraphQL avoids these waterfalls and lets you collocate declarative data with your components. This is great if your server layer supports it well.
- You also need a way to fetch all descendants’ data high up the tree (to avoid serial fetches). Relay does this with a compilation step, and requires passing pointers back down the tree for runtime use.
- Updating data (POST, PUT, Mutations) is super tricky to do in a way that keeps data consistent, avoids over-fetching, handles exceptions and idempotence and retries right, etc.
I wish there was a standard here, but I think we’re still pretty far from it.
I think one missing piece that’s far from mature is data fetching. It’s really hard to get something working well at scale:
- REST is simple, but you end up with serial waterfalls for complex fetches.
- GraphQL avoids these waterfalls and lets you collocate declarative data with your components. This is great if your server layer supports it well.
- You also need a way to fetch all descendants’ data high up the tree (to avoid serial fetches). Relay does this with a compilation step, and requires passing pointers back down the tree for runtime use.
- Updating data (POST, PUT, Mutations) is super tricky to do in a way that keeps data consistent, avoids over-fetching, handles exceptions and idempotence and retries right, etc.
I wish there was a standard here, but I think we’re still pretty far from it.