How Salsify leveraged GraphQL to improve their API Architecture

Salsify, a leading product experience management platform, has adopted GraphQL to enhance the flexibility, performance, and developer experience of their API architecture.

This article explores how Salsify leverages GraphQL to address its unique business needs and the significant benefits it has brought to their operations.

Overview of Salsify

• Industry: Product Experience Management
• Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Services: Provides a platform for managing, optimizing, and syndicating product content across various channels.

Challenges Faced

Before adopting GraphQL, Salsify encountered several challenges typical of traditional REST API architectures:

1. Overfetching and Underfetching: REST APIs often led to overfetching, where clients received more data than needed, or underfetching, requiring multiple requests to gather necessary information.
2. Complex Endpoints: Managing numerous endpoints for different resources resulted in complexity and maintenance overhead.
3. Performance Issues: Inefficient data fetching and redundant network requests impacted the overall performance of their applications.
4. Developer Experience: The rigidity of REST APIs hindered developers from easily customizing data queries to fit their specific needs.

Implementing GraphQL

Transition to GraphQL

Salsify decided to transition from REST to GraphQL to overcome these challenges and improve their API architecture. This involved:

1. Assessing Current API Usage: Analyzing existing API calls to understand common data access patterns and client requirements.
2. Defining a Schema: Creating a GraphQL schema that models the data and relationships within Salsify’s product management system.
3. Building the GraphQL Server: Implementing a GraphQL server to handle queries, mutations, and subscriptions.

Key Features of Salsify’s GraphQL Implementation

1. Single Endpoint: Unlike REST, which requires multiple endpoints, Salsify’s GraphQL API uses a single endpoint for all operations, simplifying client interactions.
2. Precise Data Fetching: Clients can specify exactly what data they need, reducing overfetching and improving efficiency.
3. Real-Time Data: Leveraging GraphQL subscriptions to provide real-time updates to clients, ensuring they have the most current information.

Benefits Realized

1. Improved Performance

• Efficient Data Retrieval: By enabling clients to request only the necessary data, GraphQL reduces the amount of data transferred over the network, leading to faster response times and improved application performance.
• Reduced Network Requests: GraphQL consolidates multiple data-fetching operations into a single request, minimizing the number of network calls required.

2. Enhanced Developer Experience

• Flexible Queries: Developers can tailor their queries to fetch exactly the data they need, simplifying the development process and reducing boilerplate code.
• Schema Introspection: GraphQL’s introspection capabilities allow developers to explore the API schema, understand available queries and mutations, and quickly integrate with the API.

3. Simplified API Management

• Single Endpoint Management: Managing a single endpoint reduces the complexity associated with maintaining numerous REST endpoints, streamlining API maintenance and updates.
• Strong Typing: GraphQL’s strongly typed schema ensures data consistency and reliability, catching errors early in the development process.

4. Real-Time Capabilities

• Subscriptions: Implementing GraphQL subscriptions enables Salsify to push real-time updates to clients, keeping them informed of changes as they happen. This is particularly useful for product information that needs to be consistently up-to-date.

Use Cases

1. Product Information Management

Salsify’s platform enables clients to manage and optimize product content across various channels. Using GraphQL, clients can query for specific product attributes, images, and metadata without overfetching unnecessary data. This streamlined data retrieval enhances the performance of client applications and improves the overall user experience.

2. Content Syndication

Salsify helps brands and retailers syndicate product content to different marketplaces and channels. With GraphQL, clients can customize their queries to fetch only the relevant content for each channel, ensuring accurate and efficient data delivery.

3. Real-Time Collaboration

GraphQL subscriptions facilitate real-time collaboration among team members. When one team member updates product information, the changes are immediately reflected in the application for all users, ensuring everyone has access to the latest data.

Conclusion

By adopting GraphQL, Salsify has significantly enhanced its API architecture, addressing the limitations of traditional REST APIs.

The transition to GraphQL has led to improved performance, a better developer experience, simplified API management, and the ability to deliver real-time updates.

Salsify’s successful implementation of GraphQL demonstrates the powerful advantages this query language can offer, making it an excellent choice for companies looking to optimize their API architecture.