Craft GraphQL APIs in Elixir with Absinthe: Flexible, Robust Services for Queries, Mutations, and Subscriptions - Softcover

Williams, Bruce; Wilson, Ben

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1680502557 ISBN 13: 9781680502558

Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2018

Synopsis

Your domain is rich and interconnected, and your API should be too. Upgrade your web API to GraphQL, leveraging its flexible queries to empower your users, and its declarative structure to simplify your code. Absinthe is the GraphQL toolkit for Elixir, a functional programming language designed to enable massive concurrency atop robust application architectures. Written by the creators of Absinthe, this book will help you take full advantage of these two groundbreaking technologies. Build your own flexible, high-performance APIs using step-by-step guidance and expert advice you won't find anywhere else.

GraphQL is a new way of structuring and building web services, and the result is transformational. Find out how to offer a more tailored, cohesive experience to your users, easily aggregate data from different data sources, and improve your back end's maintainability with Absinthe's declarative approach to defining how your API works.

Build a GraphQL-based API from scratch using Absinthe, starting from core principles. Learn the type system and how to expand your schema to suit your application's needs. Discover a growing ecosystem of tools and utilities to understand, debug, and document your API. Take it to production, but do it safely with solid best practices in mind. Find out how complexity analysis and persisted queries can let you support your users flexibly, but responsibly too. Along the way, discover how Elixir makes all the difference for a high performance, fault-tolerant API. Use asynchronous and batching execution, or write your own custom add-ons to extend Absinthe. Go live with subscriptions, delivering data over websockets on top of Elixir (and Erlang/OTP's) famous solid performance and real-time capabilities.

Transform your applications with the powerful combination of Elixir and GraphQL, using Absinthe.

What You Need:

To follow along with the book, you should have Erlang/OTP 19+ and Elixir 1.4+ installed. The book will guide you through setting up a new Phoenix application using Absinthe.

About this title

About the Author

Bruce Williams is a polyglot technologist, speaker, and writer interested in everything from learning type systems and writing parsers to designing UX. He is the CTO of CargoSense, a logistics intelligence company, and the co-creator of Absinthe, the GraphQL toolkit for Elixir.

Ben Wilson is a full-stack developer and leading member of the Elixir community as an open source maintainer, contributor, and conference speaker. He is the back-end team lead at CargoSense and the co-creator of Absinthe.

Review

"Like GraphQL's meteoric rise, this book is sure to a breakout hit for readers looking to revolutionize the way they write APIs. Ben and Bruce combine their Absinthe expertise with their production experience to take readers from the basics of GraphQL to exercising its most powerful features with Elixir and Phoenix." -Chris McCord, Author, Phoenix framework

"If we're lucky, about once per decade or so we'll come across atechnology that has the chance to revolutionize the Web. GraphQL is onesuch set of technologies. This book is written by two of the industry'sexperts--co-authors of one of the best and most complete GraphQLimplementations. Even if you're not planning to deploy on Elixir, thisbook will show you GraphQL done right." -Chad Fowler, Microsoft andBlueYard Capital

"Absinthe single-handedly made one of the mostcritical and complex parts of Trailpost's infrastructure the piece Iworry about least. This book should be on the radar of anyone developing APIs in Elixir, and probably some who aren't" -Daniel Pehrson, Founder, Trailpost.com

"GraphQL is a broad but rewarding topic, and Bruce and Ben have covered it comprehensively. This book introduces the keyGraphQL concepts in a very approachable way. It then makes sure you have all the tools and techniques to build robust, well-structured, andincredibly fast GraphQL APIs using Elixir, Absinthe, Ecto, and Phoenix. A killer combination for building amazing applications if ever there wasone!" -Josh Price, Technical Director, Alembic

"GraphQL is a game changer, and now you can use it with Elixir! This book is an invaluable must-read for any Elixir developer. I referred to it often as I helpedprepare our web team for the next generation of APIs." -DanielBerkompas, Senior Software Engineer, Infinite Red; Creator ofLearnElixir.tv & LearnPhoenix.tv

Edition details

• Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1680502557
• ISBN 13: 9781680502558
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304