We present here a list of public GraphQL APIs.

Production

• Github
• Reddit
• Twitter
• Giphy
• Hacker News
• Hudl - http://hudl.com
• AlphaSights - http://alphasights.com
• Beek.io - http://beek.io
• Superchargers.io - http://S=superchargers.io

Other list of GraphQL APIs

• GraphQL Hub: Hacker News, Reddit, GitHub, Twitter, and Giphy - https://www.graphqlhub.com/
• API guru list - https://github.com/APIs-guru/graphql-apis
• Facebook list of GraphQL users - https://graphql.org/users/

Study

• StarsWar API - http://graphql-swapi.parseapp.com/
• GDOM - scraping

Others

Dan Shafer along with Lee Byron, and Nick Schrock created GraphQL about seven years ago.

Dan Shafer at GraphQL Conference in Berlin:

It is unreal to be here. I feel like I say this every time because every time it’s true, you know, looking around the room, it was 200 people two years ago. 400 people last year. 800 people here in Berlin today for a graphical conference. Uh, this doesn’t happen without you, the community, So thank you all for coming. Um, this is GraphQL, you will think I’m not giving anything away there. I feel like at this point, the story of graft you. Well, we told it a bunch of times. You know, we’ve told that story of the initial prototype in February of 2012 and, you know, hacking in the corner and trying to figure out what this was going to be and eventually shipping it in the IOS app in August three open sourcing in July of 2015. And then, of course, where we are today. But the story that we haven’t told quite as much in the story that I think is really important to understand. GraphQL and why it exists and a lot of the decisions we made is that prehistory. But I’d like to talk about today is what GraphQl was before GraphQl.

The origin stories of GraphQL, really date to sort of a shift in not just what Facebook was doing, but in the industry as a whole. And that shift was mobile. It was clear at that juncture in the industry that massive amounts of adoption and usage was shifting to mobile like a systematic shift in consumer behavior. It was also very self evident that the Facebook mobile strategy was not working. We were a Web company. We were really good at building websites. Let’s have our mobile app, Theo website like That’s what we can do. We can deploy it quickly. We can take a lot of our experience and apply it there, and what we were realizing about about 2011 is this was just not going to give an experience that we wanted our users to have. We had built these APS that we’re lovers, you Web technology, in order to build mobile lapse, and that was not working at a technical level. Every year the native applications got higher and higher quality, and and the mobile browsers got kind of worse and worse in bug here and bugger and slower. Here we were with our Facebook mobile website, with their native APs just being thin wrappers around this website, and it wasn’t good. I mean now. Mark famously says that the decision to adopt issue on five on Mobile was the worst decision in the company’s history. The biggest risk that he noted in that WAAS that we hadn’t figured out mobile yet. And we were watching this industry shift from desktop computers and browsers to mobile phones, and we didn’t really have a good rap on that. So this was a big deal. The inability of ah large technology company to adjust to a technology shift as big as the mobile shift is the type of thing that will consign a seemingly unstoppable empire to the grave in a matter of a few years, right? So this is a big deal of the company, and so we really took a hard look at what our strategy on mobile wasn’t said. You know what? We need to rewrite the Facebook Iowa sap we had spun up a team filled a lot of IOS veterans. A lot of them were new to the company, and then they also injected Cem.

Existing folks from Facebook toe rebuild the eyeless app from scratch using native technologies. The standard joke is they started in the hit file New project. They started with our existing AP Ice and immediately hit issues. We had never built a mobile application where all of the logic happened in the application and it treated the server like just a A P I to load data from that kind of technical architecture had never existed before. It wasn’t just that you had a list of stories or each story had no, here’s the person who wrote the story. Here’s what they said. Here’s those two comments done. They were like interconnected and nested and recursive, and there’s a lot of really complicated things going on. Those AP eyes at the time weren’t really designed to allow you to expose a full rich, newsfeed like experience. They didn’t have sort of this hierarchal nature. They didn’t have this easy ability to select what you needed. They didn’t have the ability to, you know, display a list of heterogeneous feed stories, which was something that we would need to dio. And so we have all these flight problems that were coming to us Way had to building a P i to support news feed. We had to deal with this network issue. We had to kind of change the way that we’re thinking about building things internally from returning HTML files to returning raw data and then these mobile teams that were trying to build this compelling app. So a lot of these, like questions were bubbling up in parallel around the company. We sort of emerged at the start of 2012 going, You know what? We’re probably going to need a new news feed, a p I in order to build the mobile app that we want to deliver to our users. One of things that I think was unique about Facebook at the time, and it really still holds true. Today is just how empowered sort of individual engineers are to figure out what is the right way to accomplish high level goals. And in this case, you know the company did have this high level strategy. We knew that we had to build this native mobile app. We had to have a better experience, but even that’s pricing too much. I don’t know that we necessarily has a high level goal. Needed a name, native mobile app That’s almost two tactical. We knew that we needed better mobile experience. That was sort of the vision.

That was the thing that the company was oriented around and the decision of OK, this needs to be a native app. In order to accomplish that. That was engineers on the ground saying, Hey, this is how we’re going to build the experience that our users want without a culture that really encourages that level of creativity that level of innovation and that empowerment of like, hey, yes, I’m gonna go work with these two people who, you know, my manager prime knew who they were. But like, you know, that wasn’t a collaboration that we were trying to do strategically or anything. It was just the right thing to do. And so we did the very first sort of piece that happened was. When Nick wrote up just a prototype the initial prototype only take a couple days to write. He wrote this prototype, it was called Super Graph. He put the code up for review and tagged like a dozen people instead of like mapping what we had this kind of like object graph and like contorting it to be a relation ALS system. What we is making object draft all the way from back to front. It was super interesting, and I immediately kind of got addicted to this idea. And then that’s when Lee entered my life any. You know, he didn’t have a bow tie on, but he hopped down to my desk. He’s like, This is really interesting. Have some feedback. What if we also did this? What if we also did that? I’ve been already thinking about the news feed problem and how to relate it from the mobile site. So what if I took my idea and introduced it here? I know Nick was looking at this. I know he was looking at this bow was someone on the mobile team who’s looking at this, and eventually the three of us got to talking. That’s when Dan got involved. We’re starting talk to talk to Dan about this, and then he got really excited about the idea as well. It’s like, Oh, this is This is a really interesting way of how tall these things together. I was also kind of talking to Dan a lot during this time. We had worked together, so the team kind of naturally organically formed and that we were off to the races on. That led to probably the most intense two weeks of my career. So far, you know, even six years on, nothing compares to it where Lee nick myself on. I believe Jonathan Dan, who was an engineer on the IOS up at the time, basically found four desks that were sort of off in this corridor that, you know, no one was really using at the time, cause we had plenty of space on campus. We had just moved like let’s go and build this thing. Even then, we were in 100% confident. That was the right call, but we thought it was worth trying. And so he got some some headspace to try that out. Dan was utterly critical because he knew more about news, feed and the way it operated than anyone else. The company. What? Lee brings rise that deep, hard core computer science like he can write apart. Sir, you could read a compiler and also brought a certain design aesthetic to it as well. That was kind of the combination that made a work. We took a hard goal and we started racing towards that. This thing has to be up production ready, serving FBI requests and do everything that newsfeed does by this state. A lot of clocks have straight midnight at the same time, nor births work, feed, rewrite needed to work. We need to make graphic. You’ll work. The Native Mobile team had to execute.

And there’s a thana unknown technical complex and all that stuff. And then we just kind of in this rhythm where to start working ridiculous hours, not cause anyone is asking us to you. But like we were addicted, it was one of the coolest experiences of my life to just to be so excited about what we were working on that, you know, way almost couldn’t be torn away from a graphical started to take shape in those couple of months. And this sort of went until August was actually mid August that we released what was at the time, no PNAS Facebook for IOS 5.0, it was the native rewrite. It was the first time that Graphql was deployed in the wild and really over the next probably a year and 1\/2 expanded sort of the surface area of the graft. U L A. T. I do not just cover news feed, but really to cover most of the product. That is the Iowa Sap, you know, then in the IOS up today on that was sort of the end of that initial chapter of graph feels development. I might self Emily with regulators about singing twist. Alright, the one I, the one stick I have is explaining in terms of multiple round trips. So I explained it. Okay, my mobile phone. You have a server. It’s like a vending machine. And so traditional rest is like you press one button and get one thing, and then this problem happens where you press one button, get one thing, leave, depress lots of buttons one at a time, and that’s slow. So what people do is they make special person special purpose buttons that like, say, like, one button, you get four things. Another button you get through. This reminds me of the episode of the office where all Dwight stuff gets locked in the vending machine. Just a sample. Lovely quarters. And he has one at a time retrieve every desk item from the vending machine. But But if, like, that bag of quarters was also in the vending machine, like you gotta put 1\/4 in to get the bag quarters out so that you can put 1\/4 and another thing out like I could only do One is, I imagine you invent a new thing where you compress exactly the buttons you want and then get shot. But in combination with that, it’s way more fun. I have no idea. If Nick anticipated the graft, you would be where it is today, three years ago. But it wouldn’t surprise me if he did like that is sort of his his You know, that gift of foresight and the ability to say you know what, just as in 2012 we could sort of gas or he could sort of guess like This is going to become the future of you know Facebook’s native mobile lapse in 2015. I think he was looking saying, You know what? This could be big. This could really change the industry. I definitely was tryingto persuade lead to open source this for a while. I think I referred to it as my Byronic fantasy.

Actually, my initial reaction wasn’t like that Sounds amazing. Like, when can I start helping was Are you sure? Convincingly to do something is a process, and then all of a sudden I agree. And we should totally redesigned the language and open source version that we don’t use. And I’m like, What are you talking about? So my pitch to Nick was, Let’s take a first principles. Look, a draft duel. If we start graph trail with what we know now and redesign it, what would we build? A lot of the changes that we ended up making a lot of the things that makes it feel even mawr designed today than it did in 2012 came from Lee. And then I think I was able to sort of look at me like, OK, if we’re gonna be, you know, at reactor Europe in July, where do we have to be by June. Where do we have to be by May We have this vision that this could really change the industry. And we had a thing that we’re like, Yes, this is ready to go. This is gonna be usable. You kind of have that special feeling like, Wow, this is actually gonna be a system that is going to move the needle. This is gonna be the way we’re going to collapse. Now all of us kind of understood that, like, if successful, that would be true. So it was It was exciting thing to build. We decided it would be really nice to announce all the work that we have been doing publicly to a crowd and so react Europe was the next conference coming up that we knew would have reasonable attendance and kind of aligned with this community that we wanted to talk to. We called it a draft. There’s definitely parts that were so very rough. And the reaction kind of blew us away.

Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us today. So let’s start by talking about clients. I development today. This is graphic You? Well, since January, inspired by your enthusiasm Nick, Dan and I, along with a handful of our co workers, have been busy on a project to evaluate every detail of graft you owe. Making improvements, fixing inconsistencies and writing a specifications that describes graft ul and how it works. Way really hope that this helps those of you who are excited to build versions of Dracula for your own servers. Graph Que el has a lot of excitement in the community. We tried to design what we thought was the ideal a p I for Front and Developers and then work backwards to technology. We’ve already seen a ton of people interested on get hub. So today I’m really excited to share with you that way. Have a working draft of this back. That it’s now public later in 2015 is when the graphic You’ll Speck was first published along with the reference Implementation in Java script, and I was one of the first users of of the job script reference implementation. I’m pretty positive that Tim Grey sir, and I put that into production, like two weeks after it was first announced. We’re even starting to like, see, like could we build something kind of like crafty well, like very quickly. That was, like, not fully featured, but kind of gave us similar benefits and right, as we were starting to actually think about. Doing that is when graphic you’ll was first released. And so we started using it right away. Graphical the tool that lets you kind of explore your graph. You’ll a P I. That was also announced at the same time, and I immediately wrapped it with with, like, an electron rapper so that I could use it outside of it, being being hosted on a Web server somewhere. And that graphical app is still on my get hub and has used all over the industry. And I built that, like, within hours of graphical first being released, which, which is pretty funny. So I was definitely a graphical early adopter. Twitter’s kind of been like an inspirational, at least for like, medium and other places, because they’re like a big company that’s using graft people. I was kind of like one of the driving forces at Medium for, like trying to get graphic you’ll going. Everyone does it a little bit differently, but a lot of people who are using who are coming from like a kind of like a legacy system, like they aren’t starting off graphical just like immediately.

Usually, people are like, Oh, graft is gonna be awesome, but we can’t do it, you know, just plug everything in. So we have to put it on top of something. So they create this, like graphic you’ll gateway that sits on top of the rest a p I. And that’s like that kind of like, you know, gives you the time to sort of start migrating stuff off of, like, rest if you want, or changing it around or doing something else on the back end. Wall Street Still getting like the benefits of graft killed that’s like what medium did is actually also sort of what Twitter did. So we have graphic you’ll and we’re using some of its sitting on top of arrested by, but it’s also connecting to, like, other micro services and stuff. But we actually have this intermediate system called Strat O just kind of like you can think of it as like a virtual database kind of thing. So what graphical ends up doing is just querying um, Strat o and then straddled gets all the data and it’s already like defined there for you. And so from that you’re able to generate this schema and everything’s kind of nice. So now it’s like you have to do is kind of like make one update to Strat o for like, Oh, I want to add this like new like some new data to it and it’s kind of automatically generated. Now it’s in the graphical schema, and you don’t have to. You don’t have to like, be Hand, you know, are like hard coating anything in the schema you can just, like, developed way faster instead of having to go through the whole process of what connecting everything. It got uptake faster than I anticipated. For sure, graph feel came out of the gates with a lot of people really in support. Early on, it was way more positive than we had thought, and it really quickly became clear that there was this demand in industry for a solution like crafty. Well, the solution that we come up with the problems that we were trying to solve, warned specific to Facebook. They were something that ah lot of companies were having. Prisma Johannes at Prisma spotted this really early and started prototyping really interesting ideas. And then there’s a bunch of other companies that thought, Wow, like this presentation, the tar, like talking about the same problems that we’re facing way should try this the clients I developer tooling that that graft you well in the open source kind of community around graphical provides is like it’s unparalleled compared with anything in the in the rest ecosystem. A developer can, with minimal minimal amount of code, get data into their component if they’re using react on the Web or or into their views in. I was there Android with basically zero boilerplate. I think that graphic feels very interesting in the sense that it it is not. Ah, you know one shop it sold like it’s got a rule. Your world you got to rebrand everything like a lot of power comes from grass field being econ aggregation layers, even old soap. A p A. That no one knows how to run. Okay, cool. Just wrap it with Kraft. Grow to me. Graphical feels a lot like reacted Just, you know, you look at react just like a whole bunch of whole class of problems that you had. When you’re building, you guys just disappear with graphic. You l a whole class of problems around. What is my data? And how do I get it in the form that I need you into the into the into the website just disappear on really solves a lot of front and problems.

Thats first kind of year after open sourcing developed really rapidly. Within six months, we had implementations of this thing and most of the programming languages that we cared about, which was completely shocking. That started with the’s new companies that thought This is interesting. We want to try it. Ah, lot of hobbyists building it out and so that I think the community developed really rapidly as a result of having those pieces out the moment when we really went. Oh, wow, this is going to be big. It was get up. Which is get how that one point reached out and then eventually announced that they were going to have their public ap I there before a p. I be a gradual FBI. Once that happened, that was sort of the moment. Well, it okay, cool. We’ve this is gonna take off. It was in 2016 when we started to explore kind of what sort of new tools can we add to our users? Toolboxes? And that was when, um, the idea of graphic You’ll came up someone someone pitched it internally, opened up issue and said, What do you all think about this? At its core is just Ah, document, right? It’s just a piece of paper that says when you return data to your users, do it in this way and they can ask for this. But what we ultimately really wanted was a way to empower our users to be able to get toe ask us for the data that they need. And that was where the power of graft feel really shined. So, um, in early 2016 1 of our engineers took about a week or so to do a proof of concept. He was able to accomplish it and about ah, a week and 1\/2.

And we had, like, the ability to get repositories and users and all of this data in just the matter of a week, which was unbelievable. And so, um, it was about eight months later that we released our our graphic. You’ll a p I in early access. That was the time when there weren’t really many other public AP eyes that were graft. You’ll AP eyes Facebook, the inventors of it had on Lee created it and used it internally. And they had a different type of a p I not a graphic. You’ll a p i that they exposed. And so we had the good fortune of being able to talk with Lee and Dan and Nick about This is where we’d like to go with this. This is the public version that we would like toa launch. What do you all think? And they were They were ecstatic. They were thrilled. They were. They were so excited being able to see what the schema could look like. And so, um, I believe it was in October of of 2016 we launched kind of our Alfa are early access of a graphic u l f B I, um, and and I remember Kyle Diggle and Dan getting on stage and kind of demo ing it, and it’s sitting in the front row being like, This is so cool. This is this is that eight months of hard work and being able to think about what our users could build with. It was amazing. And after that, um, it just kind of spread like wildfire. We had the opportunity of companies coming to us, asking like, Hey, what’s your experience? Been with graphic? You will. There were all of these different organizations that were saying, Hey, how did you do the public AP I? Because that was something that was relatively new. I think Shopify had started Teoh to do that as well. But again, the get up a p I is just so broad that there’s so much data to cover. And so I remember a graphical Europe hearing from company like car companies, the the police and Switzerland. I believe it was where, like they’re implementing graphic you well and like they’re powering these really amazing technologies. And that was just surreal to see. And that was where we started to see the community really start to explode and more and more interest, which was fascinating. My parents were so excited like you’re doing it saving for a documentary. You could be in a documentary that was so funny, like it was my contractor with a new hire. I have his second day and then they come in. It’s like I gotta do a filming you that you should pay me more. I’m really excited to see graph feel sort of enter this next phase of its life where it started its 1st 3 years is a Facebook internal problem built really to solve a very specific problem of which was the news feed FBI for IOS app, and then it expanded from there to solve more problems than Facebook, an open source. Then it became a community tool initially used by hobbyists but eventually used by companies. And so for the last three years, and spend the story of how graphical has gone from a Facebook tool to a community tool.

And I think it feels like to me that it’s about to enter in the next phase of its life, which is becoming a industry standard. That’s kind of where I see graphical going forward is hopefully and an industry standard and one that’s collaborative by all of the people that have been helping so far. The joy of program in the joy of software engineering in general is like you’ve been given this tool. Boxes like go and make whatever you want, like go and make whatever you have in mind that basically the world’s your oyster, I think graphic you well, for a lot of people is like it was this tool that they never had before they’ve never used before. And once they had it there, like, Wow, I can build more fun stuff with us. I can, you know, create greater things. And, you know, graphic labels somewhat spread throughout Facebook and spread throughout the industry because people liked using it. And, you know, if there’s one take away, it’s like if you build something that people like using, it will generally do pretty well. I totally underestimated the power of these open source communities because, like I said before the previous previous interview, we is open source document and a piece of software that was written too execute that document effectively wasn’t being used in production at Facebook, and then it was we had to rely on this community of people to form spontaneously and then build implementations of this in different languages and then actually production ISAT and build entire to ecosystem around it. Um I don’t think that was ever gonna work. And I was totally wrong. If an idea makes sense to people and they it just clicks with their mind and they can see the vision. They’re actually willing to do a lot of work in order to see it executed and then share their work, and it’s pretty remarkable thing to see you.