Facebook has set up a new open source foundation for its GraphQL project, hosted under the Linux Foundation. The aim is to enable widespread adoption and help accelerate development of GraphQL and the surrounding ecosystem.

GraphQL is a query language for APIs that has been developed for internal use in Facebook before being made open source in 2015. Its purpose is to provide a complete description of the data in your API, which can then be used by clients to ask for specific data from the API. A GraphQL query is a string that is sent to a server to be interpreted and fulfilled, which then returns JSON back to the client. The developers differentiate the way GraphQL works as handling data not in terms of resource URLs, secondary keys, or join tables; rather as a graph of objects and the models ultimately used in apps like NSObjects or JSON.

In addition to being used within Facebook for billions of API calls every day, GraphQL is now used in high profile companies including  GitHub, Netflix, Twitter and Spotify. It has also achieved widespread support with a GraphQL library available for most major programming languages. 

Writing about the new foundation, Lee Byron, one of the original developers of GraphQL, said:

"Through the formation of the GraphQL Foundation, we hope to create a space for our community to work together to help GraphQL become a reliable industry standard by encouraging broad contributions and a shared investment in vendor-neutral events, documentation, tools, and support."

The new foundation is to have a similar governance model to other projects hosted by the Linux Foundation. The list of founding members for the foundation already includes Airbnb, Apollo, Coursera, Elementl, Facebook, GitHub, Hasura, Prisma, Shopify and Twitter.

The current thinking is that the core technical projects of the foundation will be the GraphQL specification, the JavaScript implementation GraphQL.js, the DataLoader libary and the GraphiQL developer tool.

More Information

GraphQL Foundation

GraphQL On GitHub

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