The State of Introspection for REST and GraphQL APIs

3 years ago thenewstack.io

Summary: This is a summary of an article originally published by The New Stack. Read the full original article here →

If I am a REST backend, I can tell you the cURL you need to make, the optional parameters and what I return as a response, including error codes. And if I am a GraphQL endpoint, I can tell you the queries, mutations and types that I support.

It could be many things, but the important thing is that it is not a human being.

GraphQL is intuitive and performant, and the amount of tooling available around it is impressive.

What that means is that GraphQL endpoints support a GraphQL query (wow!) like this: Fundamentally, we ask a GraphQL endpoint to tell us what queries it supports using a GraphQL query (this reminds me of SQL introspection in most databases!).

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