Practical Perl Tools: GraphQL Is Pretty Good Anyway
;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution
For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.
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In a past column we had the pleasure of learning about graph databases together. That particular column was a blast to write because it gave me the opportunity to dig into graphs, something I’ve always found interesting. In the process of researching that article, I ran into GraphQL. "Oh, goody, more graphs!" I thought. Perhaps an SQL-esque language for graphs? The bad news is GraphQL is nothing like these things or the graph databases we talked about. Even though they both have "graph" in their name, I would be hard-pressed to describe how they connect (truth be told, it isn’t immediately apparent why GraphQL has "graph" in the name). The good news is GraphQL is interesting in its own right, so today we are going to give it its own column. And in keeping with my need for radical honesty, I just want to point out up front that the majority of this column will be focused on GraphQL with the Perl bits largely showing up at the end (and being straightforward-ish).
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