Sagar Ganatra's Blog

I have been writing applications using React and Redux for quite some time now and thought of trying other state management solutions out there. It's not that I have faced any issues with Redux; however, I wanted to explore other approaches to state management. I recently came across MobX  and thought of giving it a try. The library uses the premise of  `Observables` to tie the application state with the view layer (React). It's also an implementation of the Flux pattern wherein it uses multiple stores to save the application state; each store referring to a particular entity. Redux, on the other hand, uses a single store with top-level state variables referring to various entities.

When I visualize building an application, I would think of using React and Redux on the front-end which talks to a set of RESTful services built with Node and Hapi (or Express). However, over a period of time, I've realized that this approach does not scale well when you add new features to the front-end. For example, consider a page that displays user information along with courses that a user has enrolled in. At a later point, you decide to add a section that displays popular book titles that one can view and purchase. If every entity is considered as a microservice then to get data from three different microservices would require three http  requests to be sent by the front-end app. The performance of the app would degrade with the increase in the number of http requests. I read about GraphQL and knew that it is an ideal way of building an app and I need not look forward to anything else. The GraphQL layer can be viewed as a facade which sits on top of your RESTful services o...