The Guild Newsletter #8: The Fall Edition

Welcome to the fall edition of The Guild's Newsletter, where we bring you a curated collection of our community's latest happenings, insights, and contributions. From events, new features, interviews, and projects, this newsletter is your portal to all things The Guild. Let’s dive in!

Highlights of this issue:

📣 GraphQL Conference: Learn more about the first official GraphQL Conference.

📦 Hive Product Updates: Discover what's new and improved in Hive.

🛠️ GraphQL Code Generator Updates: Stay up-to-date with the latest on GraphQL Code Generator.

🔥 Teaming Up for GraphQL Fusion: Dive into the work happening in GraphQL Fusion.

🚀 New OSS Composition Library: Learn more about our latest open-source library for Apollo Federation.

📣 GraphQL 2023 Conference

Two months ago, The Guild team had a great time at GraphQL Conf 2023 in San Francisco. The event was a blast, with folks sharing cool stuff over three days. From big companies like Netflix and AWS sharing how they're using GraphQL to engaging workshops and discussions on new open-source tools, there was always something exciting happening! Check out the full recap to get the lowdown on all the exciting happenings.

The Guild members conducted GraphQL workshops and gave several talks. You can check them out here.

🎭 Other Events

We also participated in several other conferences and meetups. Here is a list of some of them:

1. RedwoodJS Conf: Laurin shared tips on Securing Your RedwoodJS App. Stay tuned for the video!

2. GraphQL San Francisco: Yassin talked about FullStack GraphQL With Rust. Watch here.

3. GraphQL Tokyo: Laurin gave a history lesson on Codegen. Watch here (same talk, different event, though!).

4. GraphQL Amsterdam: Uri talked about The Graph of Everything. Watch here.

5. GraphQL Berlin Gathering: We were there! Read the key insights by Jamie Barton.

6. State of APIs: Uri shared insights on the Current State of APIs and how GraphQL fits there. Watch here.

7. WunderGraph Launch: Uri joined a chat to talk about the GraphQL Federation. Check it out here.

8. LearnWithJason live-stream: Aleksandra and Jason developed an app with feTS! Watch here.

9. UC's first-ever Blockchain Hackathon: Along with The Graph, Saihaj helped organise and execute the hackathon.

🥖 API Days Conference in Paris

We're excited to share that the upcoming API Days conference in Paris will feature a dedicated GraphQL track. Some of our team members will be there, making it an excellent opportunity for networking and knowledge-sharing. Make sure to say hi if you’re there!

Yassin from The Guild will talk about Open Federation and GraphQL Gateways. He will share a little about the history, their current state and prospects, and the implications for the industry.

📦 Hive Product Updates

We have put much effort into Hive and recently released several new features and improvements. Here is a summary:

• Schema checks are now persisted and can be viewed in the Hive app.

• It is now possible to manually approve a schema check through the Hive app.

• We now display which clients use a specific schema coordinate.

• The Explorer page now includes subgraph information.

• You can now filter GraphQL operations by a client in the Operations view.

• In the Hive Laboratory, you can save and organize GraphQL operations.

• Hive now remembers breaking change approvals in the context of a pull request and displays the according information.

• 🔜 Kamil is working on a permissions system, meaning Hive will have member access roles soon!

To learn more about these features, check out our blog post: Hive Summer Update 2023. And stay tuned for more Hive updates!

🚀 New OSS Composition Library for Apollo Federation!

We have recently developed and introduced a new OSS composition library for the Apollo Federation. Here's the breakdown:

• It is a drop-in replacement for @apollo/composition.

• The library is MIT-licensed.

• It is fully compatible with Apollo’s validation rules and Supergraph SDL.

• The library works with both Apollo Router and Apollo Server.

To learn more about composition, validation, and why we created an open-source alternative, check out the announcement blog post on our website.

🔥 Teaming Up for GraphQL Fusion

Last year, we met with ChilliCream in Paris and found common ground on distributed GraphQL. Now, we are collaborating with other companies on the GraphQL-Fusion spec. The goal is to standardize distributed GraphQL applications and make setting up distributed or composite GraphQL services easier. We see GraphQL as an application gateway that allows the integration of GraphQL APIs, REST APIs, gRPC APIs, or even databases.

At the Guild, we are currently working on specifying the Open API to GraphQL transformation that we have developed in Mesh. The specification will be released under an MIT license once it is ready.

Want to know more? Check out the ChilliCream blog or read Amazon’s post on AWS AppSync and GraphQL Fusion.

🛠️ GraphQL Code Generator Updates

There are a lot of exciting changes in the GraphQL Code Generator!

TypeScript Performance Improvements

Bazyli Brzóska from Zendesk has done fantastic work around improving Codegen’s performance. In his PR, he:

• Implemented caching to prevent duplicate generation of types based on the combination of selected fields and possible types

• Added a configuration property extractAllFieldsToTypes: boolean to extract fields into separate types. This reduces the number of repetitions from 5,000 to 1.

The results of this change are rather impressive. This is what the change meant for their codebase:

• Generated graph.ts file size: 30.4MB → 3.9MB 

• CI run time of codegen CLI: 2:53 minutes → 19 seconds (~9 times faster! 🎉)

• CI run time of tsc --noEmit: ~6:36 minutes → ~1:16 minutes (~6 times faster)

Read more about it in the PR.

Watcher Fixes

• Fix watcher unable to find the highest common directory onWindows by Ante Sepic

• Surface error occurring during import of @parcel/watcher by Benedikt Franke

• Ignore events in .git directory by Fran Dios

Other Improvements and Changes

• The client preset now allows the use of the futureProofEnums config option by Nicolas Charpentier

• Include @graphql-codegen/client-preset in @graphql-codegen/cli by default by Aleksandra Sikora

• Avoid reading from null values when selection sets only contain fragments by Fran Dios

We’re glad to note that our GraphQL Code Generator is effectively used in projects like Shopify Hydrogen, contributing to a series of great PRs!

Community Plugins

There have also been some exciting updates for the GraphQL Code Generator’s community plugins.

Some of them include:

• @graphql-codegen/typescript-react-query: Now supports React Query v5.

• @graphql-codegen/hasura-allow-list: Added configuration to allow changing fragment definitions.

• @graphql-codegen/typescript-react-apollo: Added support for useSuspenseQuery.

• @graphql-codegen/typescript-vue-apollo: Now allows setting a clientId for multiple Apollo clients.

Huge shout out to Neil Chen, @shoma-mano, @Hal-ang, Sönke Wunderlich, Yasuhiro SHIMIZU, and Colin Sullivan ❤️

Speaking of Codegen and plugins, we’d like to mention that we recommend using the client preset for building a GraphQL client application.

📚 Nextra 3 Coming Soon

Dima has been working hard on the new Nextra release. It will have various improvements, including displaying react components in the table of contents, optimizing bundle size through prefix renaming, styling updates, replacing or removing specific libraries and components, and renaming configuration options for better clarity and code organization.

Stay tuned for the announcement!

✨ Good News for GraphQL Modules

Denis has recently merged a PR that solved many issues in graphql-modules, including one that limited its usage to Node. That means it can now be also used also in Deno, Cloudflare Workers and Bun! 🚀

👀 Interesting Projects by The Guild members

Apart from the The Guild’s projects, The Guild members are working on other rather exciting stuff. Here’s a sneak peek:

Denis has created Potok — a video transcoding solution converting live webcam streams to HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) that browsers and players can consume.

Saihaj and his friend have recently launched Intellize — an AI-first observability platform. It lets you effortlessly search logs, create dashboards and set up alerts with natural language.

Aleksandra is working on tsperf — open-source tools that help visualise TypeScript performance issues, detect regressions and decode compiler measurements. You can watch a live stream with Aleksandra and Matt Pocock on that topic here.

🤓 Reading Material

If you’re looking for some additional reading material, here are a few recommendations:

• State of GraphQL Gateways in 2023 by Dotan Simha

• The complete GraphQL Scalar Guide by Eddy Nguyen

• GraphQL Mesh で The Guild が目指す Web API エコシステムの世界観 by Yuku Kotani

🎙️ In The Spotlight

Would you like to get to know The Guild's members better? Laurin, Saihaj, and Aleksandra recently gave some interesting interviews.

• Interview with Laurin Quast on GraphQL.wft

• GRTiQ Podcast: 137 Saihajpreet Singh

• DevJourney’s interview with Aleksandra Sikora

That's a wrap! Have a ✨ fantastic ✨ day, and stay tuned for more updates as we continue working on exciting projects and pushing the GraphQL ecosystem forward.