GraphQL for Java with Spring Boot made easy.
Release candidate for internally testing additional metrics.
Release candidate for testing adding request and response metrics
The DGS and Spring GraphQL teams are super excited to introduce deep integration between the DGS framework and Spring GraphQL. This will bring the community together, and we can continue building the best possible GraphQL framework for Spring Boot in the future.
Special thanks to @kilink for being our first early adopter and contributing many bug fixes and performance improvements as part of this effort, and to @rstoyanchev and @bclozel from the Spring GraphQL team for partnering with us closely on integration between the frameworks.
You can opt-in to use DGS/Spring GraphQL by replacing the starter dependency.
Replace implementation "com.netflix.graphql.dgs:graphql-dgs-spring-boot-starter" with implementation "com.netflix.graphql.dgs:graphql-dgs-spring-graphql-starter".
You also need to add either Spring WebMVC or Spring WebFlux explicitly.
With this integration, it is technically possible to mix and match the DGS/Spring GraphQL programming models. However, to maintain consistency in your codebase and to take full advantage of DGS features, we recommend sticking with the DGS programming model. Additional features from Spring GraphQL will be available via existing Spring GraphQL extensions, such as multipart-spring-graphql and the https://github.com/apollographql/federation-jvm/pull/354 in the JVM Federation library.
The DGS Framework provides Java developers with a programming model on top of Spring Boot to create GraphQL services. Netflix open-sourced the DGS framework in 2021, and has been the widely adopted GraphQL Java framework by many companies.
Soon after we open-sourced the DGS framework, we learned about parallel efforts by the Spring team to develop a GraphQL framework for Spring Boot. The Spring GraphQL project was in the early stages at the time and provided a low-level of integration with graphql-java. Over the past year, however, Spring GraphQL has matured and is mostly at feature parity with the DGS Framework. We now have 2 competing frameworks that solve the same problems for our users.
Today, new users must choose between the DGS Framework or Spring GraphQL, thus missing out on features available in one framework but not the other. This is not an ideal situation for the GraphQL Java community.
For the maintainers of DGS and Spring GraphQL, it would be far more effective to collaborate on features and improvements instead of having to solve the same problem independently. Finally, a unified community would provide us with better channels for feedback.
The details of the implementation are discussed in detail in the documentation.
The good news is that the new integration has been mostly a drop-in replacement, not requiring any major code changes for the user.
By default, Spring GraphQL uses async dispatch for handling HTTP GraphQL Requests when using WebMVC.
In this DGS Framework we have turned off this behavior by default to preserve existing functionality, since it requires existing code to be async aware. This implies servlet filters, tests etc. need to be also async aware.
You can turn on async behavior by setting the dgs.graphql.spring.webmvc.asyncdispatch.enabled to true.
It is worth noting that with the Spring GraphQL integration, your MockMVC test set up does need to be updated. Since web request processing is now based on async dispatching mechanism, we now require explicit handling for this in the test setup.
Support for file uploads will no longer be available by default in the DGS framework. This is supported using an external dependency for Spring GraphQL via multipart-spring-graphql.
You can now inspect your schema using Spring GraphQL's [schema inspection] (https://docs.spring.io/spring-graphql/reference/request-execution.html#execution.graphqlsource.schema-mapping-inspection) feature for DGS data fetchers as well. You can now inspect schema fields and validate existing DGS data fetcher/and or Spring GraphQL data fetcher registrations, to check if all schema fields are covered either by an explicitly registered DataFetcher, or a matching Java object property. The inspection also performs a reverse check looking for DataFetcher registrations against schema fields that don't exist.
At Netflix, we tested the DGS/Spring GraphQL integration on some of our largest services. We have worked hard to make performance of the new integration on-par with the existing implementation. Performance (CPU, memory, latency) is now the same or better on all the services we have tested.
At this time, we are lacking support for SSE based subscriptions. This is on the roadmap and will be made available depending on support in Spring GraphQL.
There is some overlap between configuration properties for DGS and Spring GraphQL. Where properties overlap, we use the DGS property for the best backward compatibility. The following list is the overlapping properties.
| DGS property | Spring GraphQL property | What to use |
|---|---|---|
dgs.graphql.schema-locations |
spring.graphql.schema.locations |
Use dgs.graphql.schema-locations |
| N/A | spring.graphql.schema.fileExtensions |
Not applicable, because dgs.graphql.schema-locations includes the path |
dgs.graphql.graphiql.enabled |
spring.graphql.graphiql.enabled |
Use dgs.graphql.graphiql.enabled |
dgs.graphql.graphiql.path |
spring.graphql.graphiql.path |
Use dgs.graphql.graphiql.path |
dgs.graphql.websocket.connection-init-timeout |
spring.graphql.websocket.connection-init-timeout |
DGS property sets the Spring GraphQL property |
New properties for Spring GraphQl integration are:
| DGS Property | Description |
|---|---|
dgs.graphql.spring.webmvc.asyncdispatch.enabled |
To enable async dispatching for GraphQL requests |