Building and consuming GraphQL API in ASP.NET Core 3.1

GraphQL is an open source query language, originally developed by FaceBook. In this article, Joydip Kanjilal explains more about GraphQL and walks through a sample app. It was in the year 2012 that Facebook decided to rebuild their apps to improve performance and efficiency. It was a time when Facebook’s mobile strategy wasn’t working because of high network usage. Optimization strategies using caching might have improved the performance, but since the app was too complex, it was thought that the data fetching strategy itself should be changed. Here’s where GraphQL came in, and today it has become extremely popular among the development community worldwide. GraphQL, developed by Facebook in 2012 and open-sourced 2015, is now maintained by the GraphQL Foundation. GraphQL is a platform-agnostic, language-neutral query language that has been around for quite some time now and can be used to execute queries and fetch data. Similar to REST, GraphQL is a specification that provides an elegant and flexible way to query your data. This article discusses the features and benefits of GraphQL and then illustrates how one can work with GraphQL in ASP.NET Core 3.1.