GraphqlJS Schema pattern - graphql

I walk through some tutorials of GraphQLJS that uses graphql-tools package, with makeExecutableSchema command, some others that use graphql package using a new GraphqlSchema (as object), other with the same graphql package but the command buildSchema.
Well, the three seems to work fine ( ok, they are just building schemas in different ways. ).
Question : Is one that is somehow related to "best practice" or results in "best performance" ? Or this is definitely something i shouldn't be worried about?
Thank you :)

I think it really doesn't matter and you should use whatever you and your tooling are most comfortable with.
It can matter if, for example, you would use that same schema for Relay also. Since Relay Compiler uses template literals (`...`) syntax for schema it is easier if that is on the server side too.
I am using buildSchema() as it's easy to track in version control and I don't need to add things to schema dinamycally.

Related

Is GraphQL valid GraphQL+?

The following is true:
Javascript == Typescript
Typescript != Javascript
Can the same be said for Dgraph's GraphQL+?
GraphQL == GraphQL+
GraphQL+ != GraphQL
The reason for asking, I understand that GraphQL is not sufficient for Dgraph's goals. But does it process GraphQL if needed?
The first paragraph on their landing page reads:
We’ve modified the language to better support graph operations, adding and removing features
And also this
GraphQL+- is a work in progress. We’re adding more features and we might further simplify existing ones.
This means that these languages are incompatible. Similar, yes, but each have unique features.
To add to Sergio's answer, GraphQL+- is not fully compatible with GraphQL. We liked GraphQL and used that as a basis for a new graph query language.
However, I think we would likely look at how big of a gap is between GraphQL+- and GraphQL, and if can be bridged, we would (probably close to or after v1.0).

Is fully qualified naming vs the using directive simply a matter of opinion?

I find now that I work in a mostly solo environment that I actually type fully qualified methods calls more and more, instead of make use of the using directive. Previously, I just stayed consistent with the most prominent coding practice on the team.
Personally, I find it easier to read verbose code at a glance, I type fast especially with autocompletion and I find myself using Google more often as my source of documentation, which a fully qualified name returns a much narrower results set. These are obviously very arbitrary reasons to prefer fully qualifying over using the using directive.
In this day and age of refactoring tools, is there a concrete reason why using the using directive is superior to fully qualified or vice versa, or is this purely a personal discretion issue like comment spacing? Finally, which do you prefer and why?
Probably could call this subjective.
Where I work/What I prefer is to use using statements. It keeps the names/lines short enough, which just makes day to day life easier. Plus, you can just hover over something for the fully qualified name.
I use usings whenever possible. The less there is to read, the less I have to parse:
System.Windows.Form form = new System.Windows.Form();
is just way more work than
var form = new Form();
Please note that this does require that your entire shop commits to not doing something silly, such as creating your own super-duper Form class which causes ambiguity.
I generally prefer using/imports for real code and fully qualified code for examples/etc.
Readability.
Think about yourself in 1 year, trying to read your code. You want it to be explicit and short and have only one point of information for each data (DRY principle).

drawbacks of linq

What are the drawbacks of linq in general.
Can be hard to understand when you first start out with it
Deferred execution can separate errors from their causes (in terms of time)
Out-of-process LINQ (e.g. LINQ to SQL) will always be a somewhat leaky abstraction - you need to know what works and what doesn't, essentially
I still love LINQ massively though :)
EDIT: Having written this short list, I remembered that I've got an answer to a very similar question...
The biggest pain with LINQ is that (with database backends) you can't use it over a repository interface without it being a leaky abstraction.
LINQ is fantastic within a layer (especially the DAL etc), but since different providers support different things, you can't rely on Expression<Func<...>> or IQueryable<T> features working the same for different implementations.
As examples, between LINQ-to-SQL and Entity Framework:
EF doesn't support Single()
EF will error if you Skip/Take/First without an explicit OrderBy
EF doesn't support UDFs
etc. The LINQ provider for ADO.NET Data Services supports different combinations. This makes mocking and other abstractions unsafe.
But: for in-memory (LINQ-to-Objects), or in a single layer/implementation... fantastic.
Some more thoughts here: Pragmatic LINQ.
Like any abstraction in programming, it is vulnerable to a misunderstanding: "If I just understand this abstraction, I don't need to understand what's happening under the covers."
The truth is, if you do understand what's happening under the covers, you'll get much better value out of the abstraction, because you'll understand where it ceases to be applicable, so you'll be able to apply it with greater confidence of success where it is appropriate.
This is true of all abstractions, and applies to Linq in bucketfuls. To understand Linq to Objects, the best thing to do is to learn how to write Select, Where, Aggregate, etc. in C# with yield return. And then figure out how yield return replaces a lot of hand-written code by writing it all with classes. Then you'll be able to use it with an appreciation of the effort it is saving you, and it will no longer seem like magic, so you'll understand the limitations.
Same for the variants of Linq where the predicates are captured as expressions and transported off to another environment to be executed. You have to understand how it works in order to safely use it.
So the number 1 drawback of Linq is: the simple examples look deceptively short and simple. The problem is, how did the author of the sample know what to write? Because they knew how to write it all out in long form, and they knew how pieces of Linq could be used as abreviations, and so they arrived at the nice short version.
As I say, not really specific to Linq, but highly relevant to it anyway.
Anonymous types. Proper ORM should always return objects of 'your' type (partial class, with possiblity of adding my methods, overriding etc.). There are doezne of tutorials and examples of different complex queries using linq but non of them care to explain the advantage of returning a 'bag of properties' (return new { .........} ). How am I supposed to work with anonymous type, wrap it in another class again?
Actually I can´t think of any drawbacks. It makes programming life a lot simpler because a lot of things can be written in a more compact but still better readable way.
But having said this, I must also agree with Jon that you should have some idea what you´re doing (but that holds for all technological advances).
the only drawback which it has is its performance see this article

Simple (Dumb) LINQ Provider

How easy would it be to write a dumb LINQ provider that can just use my class definitions (which don't have any object references as properties) and give me the translated SQL. It can assume the name of the properties and the columns to be same as well as the names of the classes and the underlying tables. Can you please give me some pointers.?
It took me about 4 months of fulltime work (8 hours a day) to build a stable, working provider that implements the entire spec of linq. I would say I had a very simple, buggy and unstable version after about three weeks, so if you're just looking for something rough I would say you're probably looking at anything from a week up to two months depending on how good you are and what types of requiements you have.
I must point you to the Wayward blog for this, Matt has written a really good walkthrough on how to implement a linq provider, and even if you're probably not going to be able to copy and paste, it will help you to get to grips with how to think when working. You can find Matt´s walkthrough here: http://blogs.msdn.com/mattwar/archive/2007/07/30/linq-building-an-iqueryable-provider-part-i.aspx . I recommend you go about it the same way Matt does, and extend the expression tree visitor Matt includes in the second part of his tutorial.
Also, when I began working with this, I had so much help from the expression tree visualizer, it really made parsing a whole lot easier once you could see how linq parsed to queries.
Building a provider is really a lot of fun, even if a bit frustrating at times. I wish you all the best of luck!
Give a look to the LINQExtender project, is a toolkit for creating custom LINQ providers.
Another option for giving you a leg up seems to be re-linq which is a framework for creating custom LINQ providers.
Here's the Source code and a nice overview (pdf) of what's involved in writing one.
I’ve written a tutorial series on my blog base on my experience developing a LINQ-to-SQL provider from scratch, starting with the expression tree composition stage (calling the LINQ methods), continuing with the expression visitor, breaking down of the query into components, parsing the where clause, generating the text and parameter and, eventually, compiling the whole thing into IL using the .NET expression namespace.
I’ve seen many incomplete posts that promised to explain how to write a provider, falling very short of the mark, barely scratching the surface and not actually delivering anything remotely executable.
The blog series I’ve written based on my experience has a sample project available for download with the simple provider that covers only the functionality required by the tutorial example. However, it also includes the production version supporting a number of operations (where, join, first, count, top, etc.), subqueries, nested statements, and etc. Additionally, it produces a cleaner SQL than a lot of what I’ve seen from Entities and LINQ-to-SQL. There’s no unnecessary/redundant nesting, wrapping everything in brackets and etc.
For anyone with a good level of abstract thinking, developing such a provider isn’t such a difficult task many set it out to be. I’ve developed one that’s used in production environment in about 3 months of part time work (meaning some evenings and weekends). From the get go it was aimed with performance and tidy SQL in mind – a goal it achieved.
It was a little hard to find the time to publish this material, but I thought – if it may help someone out there, there’s no reason for this experience to go to waste:
How to write a LINQ to SQL provider in C# Part 1 - Introduction
How to write a LINQ to SQL provider in C# Part 2 - Expression Visitor
How to write a LINQ to SQL provider in C# Part 3 - Where Clause Visitor
How to write a LINQ to SQL provider in C# Part 4 - Compiling Expression Trees
I have created a project 'LinqToAnything' which is designed to make it very very easy to implement a (simple) Linq provider.

A DSL for Linq Queries - looking for ideas

I am currently using a CMS which uses an ORM with its own bespoke query language (i.e. with select/where/orderby like statements). I refer to this mini-language as a DSL, but I might have the terminology wrong.
We are writing controls for this CMS, but I would prefer not to couple the controls to the CMS, because we have some doubts about whether we want to continue with this CMS in the longer term.
We can decouple our controls from the CMS fairly easily, by using our own DAL/abstraction layer or what not.
Then I remembered that on most of the CMS controls, they provide a property (which is design-time editable) where users can type in a query to control what gets populated in the data source. Nice feature - the question is how can I abstract this feature?
It then occurred to me that maybe a DSL framework existed out there that could provide me with a simple query language that could be turned into a LINQ expression at runtime. Thus decoupling me from the CMS' query DSL.
Does such a thing exist? Am I wasting my time? (probably the latter)
Thanks
this isn't going to answer your question fully, but there is an extension for LINQ that allows you to specify predicates for LINQ queries as strings called Dynamic LINQ, so if you want to store the conditions in some string-based format, you could probably build your language on top of this. You'd still need to find a way to represent different clauses (where/orderby/etc.) but for the predicates passed as arguments to these, you could use Dynamic LINQ.
Note that Dynamic LINQ allows you to parse the string, but AFAIK doesn't have any way to turn existing Expression tree into that string... so there would be some work needed to do that.
(but I'm not sure if I fully understand the question, so maybe I'm totally of :-))

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