What is GraphQL and REST
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GraphQL and REST are popular API protocols used by developers to build web applications that access data from web servers through the internet.
REST (Representational State Transfer) is a standard architecture for building web services using HTTP protocols. RESTful web services enable clients to perform CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations using standard HTTP methods, such as GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE, which corresponds to the databases’ operations.
REST is stateless, meaning it does not maintain any context information between requests. It is widely used, and it’s relatively easy to implement request and response, making it a simple and popular choice in many web services.GraphQL is a relatively new API protocol developed by Facebook in 2012 as a solution to handle the scalability issues associated with REST APIs. GraphQL uses a single API endpoint to fetch only the data that's required and eliminates extraneous data. This makes GraphQL more efficient and faster than RESTful APIs. Additionally, GraphQL allows developers to query multiple data sources with a single API request, enabling more sophisticated data retrieval by reducing traffic and data redundancy to the server.
In summary, REST and GraphQL are among the most widely used API protocols for communicating with web servers to exchange data. While REST is a standard architectural solution to building web services, GraphQL is relatively new, optimized for performance, and fetches only the data needed by the client, thereby making it more efficient, flexible, and scalable.