Not planned GraphQL API for XenForo

[ibnesayeed]

I am a big promoter of REST APIs (not just HTTP APIs), for which there is already a very popular feature request thread, Full native RESTful API built into XenForo. However, I have been exploring Facebook's GraphQL lately and found it very interesting and efficient in certain situations. XenForo as a platform provides a very robust system to organize resources with complex relationships among them that can be visualized as a rich graph of various types of resources. When thinking about the possible usage of an XF API, mobile apps and integration with other systems come first to my mind. Being able to minimize the number of requests while also minimizing the amount of data transferred by specifying the structure and selecting attributes of the response from the client side seems like a golden opportunity that GraphQL provides.

GraphQL vs. REST is a good read to understand similarities and differences between the two.

 

[ibnesayeed]

GraphQL PHP provides the basic functionality to implement such APIs.

 

[Max]

great idea

 

[ibnesayeed]

With the REST-style API in place, it is very unlikely that the effort would be duplicated to implement GraphQL (unless there is an easy way to server GraphQL as a wrapper around the REST-style API). @Chris D and @Mike do you think this one should now be marked as not planned?

 

[Mike]

Yes, this is very unlikely to happen.