Register now for better personalized quote!

IBM's first acquisition of the year could help GraphQL developers

Feb, 14, 2023 Hi-network.com
Image: gilaxia/Getty Images

IBM has acquired StepZen, a company that aims to make it easier for developers to build GraphQL application programming interfaces (APIs), and improve the performance of tools that use REST APIs. 

GraphQL is a query language for working with APIs that Facebook developed and opened sourced in 2015. The project, which is today hosted by the Linux Foundation, is growing in popularity and has become a popular alternative to REST APIs for service integration via graph-based programming.

Also:Memory safe programming languages are on the rise. Here's how developers should respond

StepZen -- IBM's first acquisition of 2023 -- adds to IBM's API services, such as its API Connect API management service. StepZen, which was founded by former IBMers, developed a GraphQL server that helps developers build GraphQL APIs with less code. Basically, it's a managed GraphQL service.

Recommends

The best programming languages

Here's a list of the most popular programming languages and where to learn them

Read now

Bill Lobig, vice president of product management for IBM Automation, told ZDNet that GraphQL is helping organizations to access data for applications across diverse IT infrastructures. It's liked by developers because it's a more efficient way of fetching data than REST. 

"GraphQL is emerging as an alternative and a complement to REST APIs because it enables declarative data fetching via a single API endpoint that returns the specific data you want from multiple sources. It's ideal for use cases where the application needs a very specific set of data and/or data that must be stitched together from multiple sources," explained Lobig.

"One of the challenges surrounding modern application development is that organizations have so many options for where they deploy and run their applications -- on-premises, in the cloud, or using a hybrid cloud model -- and different models of data structure and hosting options, for example, transactional, data warehouses, data lakes, and data lakehouses," added Lobig. 

"One trend helping organizations tackle the complexity of accessing their data and application ecosystems in these diverse and distributed environments is graph-based programming, which was popularized by GraphQL."

Also:New job? Here are 5 ways to make a great first impression

According to the 2022 State of GraphQL survey, the most popular language to write GraphQL backends is TypeScript/JavaScript, but some developers are also using Go, Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, Rust, Elixir, and Kotlin.

Developer

It's the end of programming as we know it -- againDevelopers feel secure in their jobs, but they're still thinking about quittingThe future of the web will need a different sort of software developerThe best Linux laptops for consumers and developers
  • It's the end of programming as we know it -- again
  • Developers feel secure in their jobs, but they're still thinking about quitting
  • The future of the web will need a different sort of software developer
  • The best Linux laptops for consumers and developers

tag-icon Hot Tags : Business Developer

Copyright © 2014-2024 Hi-Network.com | HAILIAN TECHNOLOGY CO., LIMITED | All Rights Reserved.