Exploring GraphiQL 2 Updates and New Features

GraphiQL is a popular tool for GraphQL developers. It is a web-based IDE for GraphQL that lets you explore a GraphQL API. It's a great tool for developers to test their GraphQL queries and mutations, and find out what the schema of a GraphQL API looks like. For many developers it's the first tool they use to learn GraphQL.

But for many years, GraphiQL hasn't had a UI update. And it's been a while since it's been updated. But now since few months, GraphiQL 2 is here. It's a complete new version of GraphiQL with a new UI and a lot of new features. In this blog post, I'll explore the new features of GraphiQL 2 and show you how to use them.

Click the image below to watch the YouTube video version of this blog post:

Little bit of history

GraphiQL is a tool that was created to help developers explore GraphQL APIs, maintained by the GraphQL Foundation. But when GraphiQL became more and more popular, developers started to create additional GraphQL IDEs. A good example of this was GraphQL Playground, which quickly became the most popular GraphQL IDE. It was loosely based on GraphiQL, but had more features and a better UI.

After GraphQL Playground became part of the GraphQL Foundation, the need for having just one GraphQL IDE became more important. So the GraphQL Foundation decided to merge GraphiQL and GraphQL Playground into one tool. GraphiQL 1 relied on major tech debt and multiple dependencies that were outdated and hard to maintain. With the merge of GraphiQL and GraphQL Playground, the GraphQL Foundation decided to create a new version of GraphiQL, which is now called GraphiQL 2. The design and creation of GraphiQL 2 was all documented in Github.

First look at GraphiQL 2

For me personally, this is one of the biggest releases in GraphQL world this year. As for too many years we had to work with GraphiQL 1, which is looking like it's coming from the Stone Age. With GraphiQL 2, the theme behind GraphiQL has really outdone themselves as they've created a better version of GraphiQL that looks like it's actually from modern day.

As you can see in the above screenshot of GraphiQL 2, it looks way more modern than GraphiQL 1. It has a dark mode, a light mode, and a system mode. It has a new UI, and a lot of new features. Compared to GraphiQL 1, it's looks like a complete new version of GraphiQL with the same feel.

Let's look at the same page in GraphiQL 1:

This screenshot is from GraphiQL 1 and as you can see it just feels outdated, from the color scheme to the used font. As oppposed to GraphiQL 2 there's no way to change the theme from the UI itself.

Most features from GraphiQL 1 are also available in GraphiQL 2, such as the docs page, history, and the ability to pass variables and headers. But GraphiQL 2 has a lot of new features as well, which I'll explore in the next section.

New features in GraphiQL 2

I already mentioned GraphiQL 2 has a dark mode, which is a great addition and something most modern developer tools have today. OFcourse, you cna also switch to system mode, which will use the system theme so it changes to dark when sun sets.

But next to dark mode the biggest feature update is the tabs to switch between multiple queries. This is a great addition as it allows you to have multiple queries open at the same time. This is something I've been missing in GraphiQL 1 for a long time.

Having tabs is especially useful when you have a query to get a list of results and a query to get a specific item. You can now have both open at the same time and switch between them.

Conclusion

GraphiQL 2 is a great update to GraphiQL 1. It has a new UI, a lot of new features, and a dark mode. It's still the easiest tool to use for GraphQL developers to explore a GraphQL API. I'm really excited to see what the future of GraphiQL 2 will bring, especially as GraphiQL 2 is now maintained more activley than GraphiQL 1 used to be.

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