Beginner’s Guide to GraphQL with Spring Boot

GraphQL is a query language for APIs that allows clients to request limited data they need, making it possible for clients to gather data in a limited number of requests. GraphQL is strongly typed protocol and all data operations are validated against a GraphQL schema.

In this article, we will build a simple GraphQL server with Spring Boot.

Adding Maven Dependencies

Create a sample Spring Boot application and add the following dependencies.

1. graphql-spring-boot-starter is used for enabling GraphQL servlet and it becomes available at a path /graphql. It initializes GraphQLSchema bean.
2. graphql-java allows to write schema with GraphQL schema language which is simple to understand.
3. graphiql-spring-boot-starter provides user interface using which we could test our GraphQL queries and view query definition.

        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.graphql-java</groupId>
            <artifactId>graphql-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
            <version>5.0.2</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.graphql-java</groupId>
            <artifactId>graphql-java-tools</artifactId>
            <version>5.2.4</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>…