Introducing GraphQL

GraphQL is a specification for querying data – general guidelines on how to query data efficiently. This specification was developed by engineers at Facebook in 2012 while working on their mobile application's REST services. They wanted to use their existing REST service on their mobile platforms, but it was going to require heavy modification and specific logic for mobile platforms in various areas of their APIs. The engineers also noticed that there were lots of data points in the responses to their API requests that they were not using. This meant that people with low network bandwidth were loading data they weren't even using.

So, the team at Facebook started to work on GraphQL to solve these problems and rethink the way they could fetch data for devices. GraphQL shifted the focus from the backend engineers specifying what data is returned by what request, to the frontend developers specifying what they need.

GraphQL for Gatsby

Gatsby...