Creating GraphQL servers & Reps FAST Often, GraphQL is presented as a revolutionary new way to think about APIs. Instead of working with rigid server-defined endpoints, you can send queries to get exactly the data you’re looking for in one request. And it’s true — GraphQL can be transformative when adopted in an organization, enabling frontend and backend teams to collaborate more smoothly than ever before. But in practice, both of these technologies involve sending an HTTP request and receiving some result, and GraphQL has many elements of the REST model built in. So what’s the real deal on a technical level? What are the similarities and differences between these two API paradigms? My claim by the end of the article is going to be that GraphQL and REST are not so different after all, but that GraphQL has some small changes that make a big difference to the developer experience of building and consuming an API. So let’s jump right in. We’ll identify some properties of an API, and then discuss how GraphQL and REST handle them.