Grapher - Collection Relationship Manager + GraphQL Like Data Fetcher

diaconutheodor · March 26, 2018, 4:13am

Unless you store your dynamic fields in a nested object or something, nope. There is no way.

chathuraa · March 27, 2018, 10:36am

Thanks, I’ll implment it that way.

ujwal · April 10, 2018, 1:59am

Hello folks,

I actually read every message in this thread: over 1.5 years. Very educational!

I am just getting into this graph business. Currently looking at Apollo, and my thought currently is: why the hell am I doing this? So much boiler plate! So much esoteric code!

Sometime last year, I wrote an article on “Why I feel in love with Meteor”…I am a reasonably intelligent fella, but had no JS or web application experience until a couple of years ago. I stood up a production app in 10 days… Learning JS, Meteor, and all…Meteor helped me do that.

I feel that if I had started with Apollo, nothing against it but my stupidity, I would still be lost.

So, here is my question…I am starting a new project… And started wading into Apollo… In fact trying out the meteor-Apollo integration by @diaconutheodor. And my client is react-native. But is this the right way to go?

I want the reactivity of meteor, but want to control it. I want the query capability of graphql. I want the accounts system of meteor and connection reactivity. I want the minimal boilerplate of meteor.

Grapher is starting to sound real good to me right now, but how is does it relate to cultofcoders:apollo?

Why am I even messing with graphql when grapher could potentially do it for me?

What am I missing? Forgive dumb questions from a graph newbie…

diaconutheodor · April 10, 2018, 2:23am

Hello @ujwal

First of all, thanks for your patience of reading this giant-ass thread

What I managed to prove with the latest performance reports (https://github.com/theodorDiaconu/grapher-performance) is that Grapher blends in with Apollo, it makes you write much less code, and you have a lot of performance benefits, this is something you rarely see in programming world.

Now, you have to understand that while Grapher shares some similarities with GraphQL in the sense of requesting data, they are worlds apart in terms of their objective and functionality. One is a relationship manager the other is a data layer.

Now the question is not whether to use Grapher or not (the answer is clearly yes), it’s whether you want to use Apollo/GraphQL. My answer is you should look into it. I also thought Apollo is complicated, hard to understand, to learn, but it’s false. Look again at grapher-performance repo I pasted above, look how elegantly the collections and relationships are done:

github.com

theodorDiaconu/grapher-performance/blob/master/server/entities/Comment.gql

type Comment @mongo(name: "comments") {
  _id: ID!
  text: String
  user: User @link(field: "userId")
  post: Post @link(field: "postId")
}

This is done by using GraphQL directives, and believe me when I say they are very powerful.

The main issue I had is that, to implement something reactive in GraphQL it was so damn hard, I missed the elegance of Meteor. But with a little bit of work, faith and powering through we brought it here:

github.com

cult-of-coders/apollo/blob/master/docs/live_queries.md

# Live Data

```js
meteor npm i -S apollo-live-client apollo-live-server
```

This package comes already with the [apollo-live-server](https://www.npmjs.com/package/apollo-live-server) npm package already set-up, but for client you will also need: [apollo-live-client](https://www.npmjs.com/package/apollo-live-client)

```js
type Subscription {
  users: ReactiveEventUser
}

type ReactiveEventUser {
  event: String,
  doc: User
}
```

```js

This file has been truncated. show original

I think this is far more elegant in the sense that you get the benefits of GraphQL for subscriptions. The only things missing are the “Reactive Data Graphs”. While they may get on the roadmap, the biggest problem with those are the fact they are performance hogs, I highly recommend against (because I know what’s happening behind the scenes), however, with a little bit more code, you can benefit from this in apollo-live-server npm package and configure things how you want.

ujwal · April 10, 2018, 3:58am

Thanks @diaconutheodor! I will continue pushing ahead with your Meteor/Apollo package. At least now I have my react-native client talking to the server

Jacques · May 20, 2018, 1:29am

If there is no integration, then how can one apply the Grapher methods (e.g., createQuery, addLinks, etc. ) to Astronomy Classes instead of Mongo Collections?

Thanks in advance for clarifying this point .

diaconutheodor · May 20, 2018, 6:29am

@Jacques there must be a way to get the Mongo.Collection instance from the Astronomy Class, and you can play with that one directly.

Jacques · May 20, 2018, 4:44pm

Perhaps but then you loose the class-based object-oriented abstraction to manipulate the database which is the main purpose of Astronomy if I understood well.

diaconutheodor · May 21, 2018, 10:15am

Well, I think this is a question for Astronomy maintainers, rather than Grapher. I’m not familiar with the internals, however from my experience I try to move away from OO abstractions of DB, they do more harm than good in the long-run. Cheers

emhmark7 · June 28, 2018, 2:09am

Can we have an update about Grapher? Is it current? Actively maintained? VS Apollo? etc. Thanks

diaconutheodor · June 28, 2018, 3:55am

Ofcourse it is maintained. And works together with Apollo beautifully!

adamginsburg · March 24, 2020, 12:32pm

@diaconutheodor just checking in if you’re still recommending Grapher… it looks really interesting.

One of the reasons I ask, is I tried running redis but ran into issue with PublishComposite, which we use pretty heavily. And was of the recommendations was to avoid publish composite https://github.com/cult-of-coders/redis-oplog/issues/352#issuecomment-601830807

in your video you mentioned the package is based on PublishComposite, so wondering if I should look at this or if you have any newer approaches.

The other reason, was just looking at last updates was several months back, so thought I’d check before I went down this path.

thanks

diaconutheodor · March 25, 2020, 6:30am

PublishComposite can become very heavy. Use it with precaution. Grapher is still solid if you want to take part of the full Meteor ecosystem with DDP and stuff.

adamginsburg · March 31, 2020, 9:31pm

Thanks @diaconutheodor. Are you guys still pushing Meteor as strongly?

diaconutheodor · April 1, 2020, 6:09am

Yes. It is the most advanced server-side bundler out there. We are using the thin yet very powerful part of Meteor for Backend using Apollo & TypeScript and almost no Meteor packages (as we want to embrace the full npm ecosystem and we believe that Meteor will soon adopt this change too in the future)

For frontend we are using Webpack + React & Typescript, (sometimes Preact for TV apps).

smeijer · August 8, 2020, 9:04pm

Can you share your “not so many Meteor packages” with us? I’m curious to learn what your basic stack looks like.