This article was published on July 2, 2015

Facebook reveals the secrets of the language that handles data in its iOS and Android apps


Facebook reveals the secrets of the language that handles data in its iOS and Android apps

Back in May, Facebook promised to publish an open source reference implementation and language specification for GraphQL, the query language for graph data that powers interactions in its Android and iOS applications.

And, lo and behold, that’s just what it’s done. You can now get your hands on a draft Request for Comments (RFC) specification for the language and take a look at a reference implementation on GitHub.

GraphQL was built during Facebook’s move away from HTML5 apps to full native implementations. It’s a querying language designed to describe complex, nested data dependencies.

Facebook says the aim of putting the information out there now is so that other projects and companies can use the language to access their own data.

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Here’s a video from React.js Conference that goes into more detail about how Facebook goes about data management:

GraphQL [GitHub]

Read next: Facebook open sources Infer: Bug tracking on a massive scale

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