GQLevated: Elevate Your Project with Seamless GraphQL Integration

GraphQL is a database query language that centers flexibility and precision as its core tenets. It’s an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs, and a runtime for fulfilling queries with existing data. GraphQL was developed by Facebook in 2012 before its public release in 2015. It was developed to address the inherent issue of over or under fetching data that comes with traditional REST architecture (queries). This topic became more prevalent as technology advanced and smartphones became more accessible. With the increased mobile usage, came the need for more efficient data loading. Additionally, the proliferation of modern web browsers requires data structures to be flexible enough to accommodate browser needs. GraphQL allows client-side structuring of each data request, ensuring a response with the proper data content and structure.

With REST, you have to make three requests to different endpoints to fetch the required data. You’re also overfetching since the endpoints return additional information that’s not needed. (https://www.howtographql.com/basics/1-graphql-is-the-better-rest/)

Using GraphQL, the client can specify exactly the data it needs in a query. Notice that the structure of the server’s response follows precisely the nested structure defined in the query. (https://www.howtographql.com/basics/1-graphql-is-the-better-rest/)

Using GraphQL, a client can target specific data in a single query, enabling fetching with extreme precision and designating the desired structure of the server response, even in complex and deeply-nested scenarios. What does this mean? It means that the use of GraphQL gives the client side the power to structure the server response to be as broad or narrow as the client defined, preventing unnecessary data fetches and improving efficiency. Since GraphQL relies on a single server endpoint for all queries, this is a large contrast with the RESTful approach, which calls for various endpoints in order to retrieve specific information.

Building out a GraphQL API can seem like a daunting task given the amount of time typically associated with setting up the schema and GraphQL object types, which allows the management of the data and return the desired response whenever a query occurs. If you are thinking of how to go about transitioning your application from a traditional RESTful architecture to GraphQL, setup can become an issue due to the scale of your application and the time it takes to convert from one architecture to the next.

This hurdle is exactly what GQLevated’s developer tool addresses. GQLevated really focused on what a developer would need to take into consideration in order to assists in the transition process from RESTful APIs to GraphQL. Our Web Development Tool supplies users with customized, production-ready GraphQL code including server-side Types, Root Queries and Mutations as well as client-side Queries and Mutations. This allows developers to spend more time solving problems and less time tediously writing GraphQL code, thus ELEVATING the project as a whole. And it’s free to use for everyone — no need to create an account! Our motivation for building GQLevated stemmed from the desire to soften the learning curve by supporting the development of medium and large scale applications, making the extraordinary features that GraphQL has to offer more accessible.

How it works

Connect Your Database

Head over to GQLevated and navigate to “Use GQLevated”. From here all you have to do is input your PostgreSQL or MongoDB database URI and GQLevated will take care of the rest! Don’t have a connection string but still want to see how it works? No problem! Connect to our PostgreSQL Sample Database and see GQLevated in action.

Generate Your GraphQL code

With one simple click of a button GQLevated will encrypt your URI connection string, send it to the server for decryption, connects to your database, parses the data, and generates the corresponding GraphQL code for you. This production-ready GraphQL code includes server-side Types, Root Queries and Mutations as well as client-side Queries and Mutations. It is displayed for you in an easy to reason about way and ready to be injected into your own application.

Export Your Code

In addition to copying and pasting the newly generated GraphQL code straight from the browser display, users also have the option to export their customized GraphQL code as individual JavaScript files. Simply click on the ‘Export Code‘ button in the corresponding container of the code that you wish to download.

GraphQL is here to stay and GQLevated was created to make the migration away from the RESTful architectural pattern as simple for developers as possible. By providing both GraphQL boilerplate, interactive database visualization and easily exportable code, GQLevated seeks to optimize your new and existing codebase with more efficient database querying.

GQLevated is an open source GraphQL prototyping tool that remains in active development. If we’ve piqued your interest, please check us out on Github, where our engineering team is actively seeking feedback, monitoring issues, and answering questions. We are always looking for ways to improve.

The GQLevated Team | Linkedin | Github

John Alicastro | Linkedin | Github

Quyen Calixto | Linkedin | Github

Johnson Che | Linkedin | Github

Nicholas Gonzalez | Linkedin | Github