WordPress has successfully transitioned from a Blog to a CMS and now is becoming a platform for which anything can be built. However, the evolution is still continuing, and GraphQL is part of the platform evolution.
GraphQL is a query language spec that allows data from any system, including WordPress, to be queried as if it were a Graph of data.
I will walk through what WordPress as an Application Data Graph looks like, and how GraphQL can make querying data from the WP Application Data Graph easy, declarative and highly performant.
We will look briefly at how GraphQL compares to REST, some similarities and differences.
We will look at some examples of WPGraphQL in production on large publishing sites, such as DenverPost.com and SiliconValley.com.
We will dive into how to use GraphQL to query data from WordPress using the WPGraphQL plugin (https://github.com/wp-graphql/wp-graphql).
In this portion of the talk, we will look at demos of querying and mutating (writing) data in WordPress using a GraphQL IDE tool called GraphiQL.
Then we will discuss what benefits GraphQL provides for decoupled applications, the tooling around GraphQL that makes it a pleasant experience to work with.
Some benefits I will highlight are: performance gains over REST, the ability to request multiple resources without round trips to a network, tooling around GraphQL (such as GraphiQL IDE and other IDE plugins).