People around me are talking about using GraphQL, where they position this next to or opposed to REST API’s. I was not sure how these compare so I needed to find out.

In short, from 10000 feet, GraphQL is an alternatief for REST API’s for application programming interfaces. GraphQL provides more flexibility from several perspectives. Read more about that in the link below.

However, it requires a specific GraphQL server side infrastructure. This is probably also going to be a problem for large scale adoption. You can build a GraphQL client in a number of programming languages, but to serve as a GraphQL provider you need one of the few server side implementations.

So, a big benefit of REST API’s is that is is an implementation-independent interface specification that is easy to implement on your server side middleware. GraphQL would require your middleware to integrate one of the GraphQL implementations, or build one natively. This could be a matter of time and adoption, but currently I do not see a broad adoption.

 Apollo, graphql-ruby, Juniper, gqlgen, and Lacinia are GraphQL implementations. 

I found the article that best describes what GraphQL is on the AWS blog Comparing API Design Architectures – AWS (amazon.com). (I am not an AWS afficionado, it is just that the article best addressed what I wanted to know.)