IBM has acquired StepZen, a company that aims to make it easier for developers to create GraphQL application programming interfaces (APIs) and improve the performance of tools using REST APIs.
GraphQL is a query language for working with APIs that Facebook has developed and open source in 2015. The project today hosted by the Linux Foundationis growing in popularity and has become a popular alternative to REST APIs for integrating services through graph-based programming.
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StepZen – IBM’s first acquisition in 2023 – adds to IBM’s API services, such as its API Connect API management service. StepZen, which was founded by former IBMers, has developed a GraphQL server that helps developers build GraphQL APIs with less code. Basically, it’s a managed GraphQL service.
Bill Lobig, vice president of product management for IBM Automation, told ZDNet that GraphQL helps organizations access application data across various IT infrastructures. It’s popular with developers because it’s a more efficient way to fetch data than REST.
“GraphQL is emerging as an alternative and complement to REST APIs because it allows declarative data retrieval through a single API endpoint that returns the specific data you want from multiple sources. use where the application needs a very specific set of data and/or data that needs to be assembled from multiple sources,” Lobig explained.
“One of the challenges surrounding modern application development is that organizations have so many options for deploying and running their applications – on-premises, in the cloud, or using a hybrid cloud model – and different data and hosting options, for example, transactional, data warehouses, data lakes and data lakehouses,” Lobig added.
“One trend that is helping organizations deal with the complexity of accessing their data and application ecosystems in these diverse and distributed environments is graph-based programming, which has been popularized by GraphQL.”
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According to Survey on the state of GraphQL 2022the most popular language for writing GraphQL backends is TypeScript/JavaScript, but some developers also use Go, Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, Rust, Elixir, and Kotlin.