Comment by gavinray

I'm probably about as qualified to talk about GraphQL as anyone on the internet: I started using it in late 2016, back when Apollo was just an alternate client-side state/store library.

The internet at large seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding about what GraphQL is/is not.

Put simply: GQL is an RPC spec that is essentially implemented as a Dict/Key-Value Map on the server, of the form: "Action(Args) -> ResultType"

In a REST API you might have

  app.GET("/user", getUser)
  app.POST("/user", createUser)

In GraphQL, you have a "resolvers" map, like:

  {
    "getUser": getUser,
    "createUser": createUser,
  }

And instead of sending a GET /user request, you send a GET /query with "getUser" as your server action.

The arguments and output shape of your API routes are typed, like in OpenAPI/OData/gRPC.

That's all GraphQL is.