blog/relay-graphql-the-choice-of-a-stable-front-end/

[giscus[bot]]

blog/relay-graphql-the-choice-of-a-stable-front-end/

Learnings from a journey from Apollo to Relay

https://www.defer.run/blog/relay-graphql-the-choice-of-a-stable-front-end/

[KayakinKoder]

Really helpful article, thank you. "Relay will slow you down at first but will make you win in the long term" seems very true.

A question for Defer or anyone really -- are you writing your own server-side implementation to support Relay? Currently we're using Hasura which has made the backend implementation of GraphQL 10x faster, and I'd hate to lose that productivity...but it seems they might be abandoning Relay.

[julian-mayorga]

Currently we're using Hasura which has made the backend implementation of GraphQL 10x faster, and I'd hate to lose that productivity...but it seems they might be abandoning Relay.

Happy to see you move 10x faster with Hasura!

Just wanted to mention that we love <3 Relay and we're not only supporting the Relay Spec but also we're doubling down on it for HasuraDDN (https://hasura.io/blog/hasura-data-delivery-network-and-other-big-news-at-hasuracon-2023/), which is the next version of Hasura.

[KayakinKoder]

Two+ years ago, Tanmai (Hasura CEO for those unfamiliar) said Relay was a priority numerous times in numerous community calls. There hasn't been in a single Relay feature added in 3 years, no bugfixes (of which there are many highly impactful bugs), and it's still in Beta. So for others reading that ^, I wouldn't hold my breath. Other options like Grafbase and Wundergraph are moving much faster in regards to Relay.

That said, I hope this time around -- this next year or two -- Hasura does actually add some basic functionality to Relay that has been missing for many years.

[nullxone]

Here's some work we're doing to make a Relay-style API accessible to more people.
https://github.com/hasura/hasura-relay-client

@KayakinKoder Could you help me understand what the missing features are? I'd like to make sure that this is accounted for in what we're building towards!

[KayakinKoder]

Most Hasura features are missing from Relay, and some major bugs exist. See https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Ahasura%2Fgraphql-engine+relay&type=issues (especially hasura/graphql-engine#7950 gives a good overview), and the past 3 years of Discord history. Basic things like views, remote schemas, actions, etc. are missing; worse, zero feature releases in 3 years, and the only bugfix I can recall was one that was newly introduced then quickly fixed

[nullxone]

@KayakinKoder . Thanks, I have reviewed all the relay issues on this repository, including the one you linked.

The Relay API for Hasura v2 is limited to postgres tables. It works well, but only limited to this narrow scope.

Hasura v3 is being built from the ground up to resolve the issues that I have collated, primarily around ensuring Relay support across all Hasura features.

We'll need to do some additional work on making Relay available on sources like views. We can specify a set of columns that will uniquely identify a row on the view, so that we can build a global node id from that set.

Think that rounds out a complete Relay API!