2: REST vs GraphQL with Ben Wilson

REST Controllers vs GraphQL. You’ve probably heard of GraphQL but maybe you haven’t played with it yet. We talk with Ben Wilson, co-creator of Absinthe, a GraphQL library for Elixir and the book Craft GraphQL APIs in Elixir with Absinthe to get a better idea of how REST and GraphQL compare.

In this episode we discuss benefits of GraphQL, familiarity of REST, making requests over channels, getting versioning benefits, aggregating disparate data, reduced payload sizes, some of the challenges, the impact of macros on Absinthe, and much more!

Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/2

Elixir Community News

• http://example.com/ – Example website


• https://www.pragprog.com/titles/lmelixir/ – New Book "Testing Elixir" by Andrea Leopardi and Jeffrey Matthias


• https://elixirsurvey.typeform.com/to/yYmJv1 – Elixir Ecosystem Survey 2020 - Write in the ThinkingElixir Podcast!


• https://elixirforum.com/t/we-ve-just-launched-devtalk-a-new-discussion-platform-for-developers/32268 – ElixirForum announced a new discussion platform for the Elixir/Erlang communities


• Apple WWDC, new processors moving to ARM. What does that mean for Elixir development?

Do you have some Elixir news to share? Tell us at @ThinkingElixir or email at [email protected]

Discussion Resources

• https://hexdocs.pm/absinthe/overview.html


• https://player.fm/series/elixir-fountain/elixir-fountain-ben-wilson-2016-09-07 – Interview on Elixir Fountain


• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRXNmAMPNW8 – ElixirConf 2015 - Streams, External Services, and OTP


• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlxjhTc_u4o – ElixirConf 2016 - No REST for the Wicked. Building a GraphQL


• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEckzwggd78 – ElixirConf 2017 - Live APIs with GraphQL Subscriptions


• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4p4e9Uwn6I – The Big Elixir 2018 - Trapped By Our Tools


• https://thinkingelixir.com/rest-vs-graphql-for-an-api/ – Follow-up article

Guest Information

• https://twitter.com/benwilson512 – on Twitter


• https://github.com/benwilson512/ – on Github


• https://twitter.com/cargosense – CargoSense on Twitter

Find us online

• Message the show - @ThinkingElixir


• Email the show - [email protected]


• Mark Ericksen - @brainlid


• David Bernheisel - @bernheisel


• Cade Ward - @cadebward