When it comes to automating distribution yards, communication between yard trucks and the cloud requires a fast and flexible server-side API. In the first part of this series, Kyle Hayes, principal architect at Outrider, dives into GraphQL as an ideal candidate for enabling web and cloud workflows to provide real-time integration with an organization’s warehouse management systems (WMS).
Redefining Enterprise Integration
Integrating systems and software between enterprises has always been a challenge in just about every industry. Today’s approach includes many non-standardized solutions that fall on a continuum of simple to complex, such as scripts, flat files, REST APIs, and commercialized ESB (enterprise service bus) solutions, to name a few.Â
Developers involved in digital supply chain management know this all too well. However, technology leaders are redefining the rules of engagement for achieving real-time insight and visibility into the entire supply chain. Now it’s time for others to adapt to a new way of integrating, making it easier to do business together.
A single technology does not enable a company to suddenly thread their applications and data together for real-time insights into their operations overnight. However, a willingness to explore and iteratively adapt to new technologies is advised, even prudent. Large tech companies like Facebook, Airbnb, and LinkedIn are often open sourcing technologies that have revolutionized their technical operations.Â
One such open-source technology on the forefront is GraphQL. It doesn’t aim to solve every thorn in the milieu of data integration. However, its basic principles of representing the world’s ever-increasing data relationships as a strongly-typed graph are revolutionizing the way developers think about APIs and data delivery to browsers, devices, and systems. Enterprise integrations could benefit from its adoption and reduce the time-to-market.
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Web APIs Are Constantly Evolving
Over the past several years, getting dynamic data from servers has drastically changed. Hundreds of methods and implementations have been developed to accomplish the various data needs. REST APIs have served the world of integrations well past a decade—especially when compared to SOAP—but as enterprise data demands change, they can be challenging to evolve for the following reasons.Â
Some data consumers may want more information than others; a mobile client may want less data from different sources in a single response, rather than making multiple requests. Often, an inordinate amount of time is spent discussing what HTTP status code is most appropriate when, in reality, developers would much rather talk about business logic.Â
Finally, REST APIs can be difficult to keep in sync with handwritten specifications. All of these challenges can be addressed with the implementation of a GraphQL API.Â
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GraphQL Now and in the Future
GraphQL is an intuitive and ingenious modern query language that enables the shape of your response to look just like that of your request. GraphQL is solely a language specification, meaning that regardless of whether you are communicating over HTTP, sockets, or protocol buffers, it simplifies the communication by exclusively using POST and other metadata included in the envelope of the response. Users no longer have to analyze abstruse HTTP headers or read through pages of a specification only to discover that the REST library being used completely ignores it.
Of its many strengths, one is its ability to provide instinctive semantics for data specification—even if it is nested within the object model. This is especially beneficial for the client that requires a lot of attributes. For the lightweight mobile client, it is easy to remove any unnecessary attributes. The strongly typed nature and schema requirements of GraphQL ensure that clients using the API know exactly what to expect when sending queries and receiving responses, which greatly reduces the number of runtime errors that can occur in production.
Additionally, when it comes to event publishing and subscribing interactions, GraphQL introduces a model that enables the same query interface to be used. This furthers its mission to enable web applications that provide a rich and versatile user experience as data continues to change faster than ever.
In the second part of this article, we’ll discuss how the use of GraphQL provides an intuitive, well-defined, and documented query and response language.
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