GraphQL fundamentals and trade-offs + Other API styles (awareness)
Comes up in: Frontend system design, Recruiter screen
This concept is being written. It gets the full five steps — explanation, predict, interview angle, practice with tests, and review cards. Here is exactly what it will cover, so you can study it elsewhere in the meantime.
What it covers
- schema, queries, mutations, subscriptions
- over/under-fetching
- normalized client caches (Apollo, Relay, urql)
- N+1 and DataLoader
- persisted queries
- caching difficulty over HTTP
- when REST is better
- gRPC and gRPC-Web
- tRPC
- OpenAPI-generated clients
- JSON:API
- webhooks
Words you will know
What you will practise
- compare REST vs GraphQL for one screen
- decide an API style for 3 scenarios
Interview questions this answers
- REST vs GraphQL: when would you choose each?
- What is the N+1 problem in GraphQL?