COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE IN CASE OF USING REST VERSUS GRAPHQL

Abstract

Web applications are the most common type of application in modern society since they can be accessed by a large number of users at any time from any device. The only condition for their use is an Internet connection. Most applications run using the HTTP protocol and client-server architecture. This architecture is based on the use of API (Application programming interface), most often REST architecture (Representational State Transfer). If there are several different functionalities on the website that fill their content with data from the web server, for most of them a special HTTP request must be generated with one of the existing methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE). This way of communication can be a big problem if the connection to the Internet is weak, there are a lot of HTTP requests because you have to wait for each request to be executed and for the web server to return the data. In this paper, one implementation of GraphQL is presented. GraphQL is an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs. GraphQL enables faster application development and has less server code. The key advantage is the number of HTTP requests because all the desired data of the page is obtained with one request. This paper will show a comparative analysis on the example of a real website in the case of using the REST architecture and GraphQL in the case of different qualities of Internet connections, code complexity and the number of required requests.