Kiran Abburi

Offline-first apps have a unique set of challenges to keep them fully functional, even in offline mode.

Offline first apps have a unique set of challenges to keep them fully functional even in offline mode. On top of that, GraphQL based apps need new ways of solving these challenges. In this talk, I will share my experience with implementing offline first app with GraphQL & Apollo.

2019

React India

Building offline first apps with GraphQL & Apollo

Apollo is the most popular GraphQL client library at the moment. It significantly reduces boilerplate code for fetching data, showing loading status, handling updates to existing objects in cache. 

But, it can’t handle scenarios like creating new objects, deleting objects and real-time updates automatically. It requires significat amount of code to handle these scenarios and, sometimes, requires more effort than other solutions. 

In this talk, I will present how to leverage customizable cache and link interface of Apollo to simplify logic for these scenarios.

We might also hit performance issues with Apollo as the number and size of queries increase. I will talk about how to debug and fix these performance issues

ReactFoo

Deep Dive into Apollo Client

In this talk, I will share our experience with migrating a large app from redux to apollo. Initially, we used redux to manage the state of react application. As the app grew in size, we were writing lots of custom logic for network use cases like data fetching, real time updates and error handling. We implemented abstractions to reduce verbosity of network logic. But, onboarding new developers and adding new features was hard because of the home-grown abstractions. We found GraphQL and Apollo in our exploration to simplify the network logic.

GraphQL and Apollo helped us a lot in simplifying network logic on both back-end and front-end code.
After migrating the network data from redux to apollo, only a small amount of local state is remaining in redux store. Apollo 2.0 supports local state management as well. So we migrated local state also to apollo and completely removed dependency on redux in our codebase.

Outline:

- Challenges of redux and complex network logic
- How GraphQL and Apollo can simplify network logic
- Methodology for incremental migration of app from redux to apollo
- Local state management with Apollo