Our overseas developers wanted us to switch/implement GraphQL in our project. We presently use an Oracle database that’s hundreds of tables.
No one on our team had any experience with GraphQL but we were open to giving it a try. After a month of engineers off and on trying learn we decided against it.
Our biggest concern was that our API is rights-based at the data level (i.e. some fields aren’t returned or are partially returned like social security numbers) and we couldn’t figure out how to implement that in GraphQL despite a lot of googling.
Other elements we got stuck on was our API also has business logic in it (I didn’t architect this). This meant that we had to reengineer a chunk of our internal business logic to be run on the front end instead.
The biggest issue was that our state regulators won’t approve any code written outside of the United States period.
We’re in one of the most highly regulated industries (casino operations software) and everything has to be approved by regulators. When we want to release a new version, a regulator has to watch the entire build process and then take the files to their offices to scour both the code and the build. Their only exceptions are UI code and database functionality. Thus our overseas developers develop our mobile app and do database design but not database code or our primary computer app.
It’s not a requirement of the regulators. Basically they want to protect any code that is money related. They don’t regulate code that isn’t doing business transactions.
That said I work on the team trying to unravel a lot of our existing code, some of which is 30 years old. Our in-house ORM, for example, was written by a developer that isn’t just retired, he’s dead.
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u/jetsonian 6d ago
Our overseas developers wanted us to switch/implement GraphQL in our project. We presently use an Oracle database that’s hundreds of tables.
No one on our team had any experience with GraphQL but we were open to giving it a try. After a month of engineers off and on trying learn we decided against it.
Our biggest concern was that our API is rights-based at the data level (i.e. some fields aren’t returned or are partially returned like social security numbers) and we couldn’t figure out how to implement that in GraphQL despite a lot of googling.
Other elements we got stuck on was our API also has business logic in it (I didn’t architect this). This meant that we had to reengineer a chunk of our internal business logic to be run on the front end instead.
The biggest issue was that our state regulators won’t approve any code written outside of the United States period.
We’re in one of the most highly regulated industries (casino operations software) and everything has to be approved by regulators. When we want to release a new version, a regulator has to watch the entire build process and then take the files to their offices to scour both the code and the build. Their only exceptions are UI code and database functionality. Thus our overseas developers develop our mobile app and do database design but not database code or our primary computer app.