1. React
  2. React Amsterdam
  3. 2020 Online
  4. Go from being skeptical about Relay to falling in love with it

Go from being skeptical about Relay to falling in love with it

Understand common GraphQL challenges, and how Relay addresses them.

Tanmai Gopal at React Amsterdam 2020 Online

GraphQL integration (and API/data fetching in general) becomes quite repetitive and complex as our app scales. New features need to be built that are sort of similar to features that already existed, but what bits they can reuse is not clear (eg: pagination). New members join the team and we’d like them to work on their UI components without worrying about the data fetching logic of the rest of the component tree. Relay takes an opinionated stance to solve some of these problems that are worth understanding and learning from. In this talk, I'm going to motivate the core features in Relay from the ground-up. I'll do hands-on demos to explain the common challenges GraphQL clients run into, how one would fix them without Relay and then fix them with Relay. I'll also touch upon how Relay works and its design briefly and how Relay’s design goal is not just being a high-performance GraphQL client, but also increasing developer productivity and happiness.