Outline
What this site covers and how it's organized — 28 chapters across 13 parts plus Appendix A, both stacks against one SDL contract.
This site teaches GraphQL API design through one read-oriented view of a shipping and
cargo domain: the tracking view. GraphQL here is the aggregation layer that stitches
cargo, route legs and handling events into a single query-shaped graph, so a client asks
for exactly the shape it needs in one round trip. Every hands-on chapter ships the same
example in both Quarkus (SmallRye GraphQL) and Python (Strawberry). Both stacks are
code-first and export their SDL; CI diff-checks that export against the canonical SDL in
contracts/schema/, so the two stacks never drift, and a graphql-inspector gate fails any
change to the canonical SDL that would break an existing client. Real-time is a single chapter (Ch21) that compares
subscriptions, SSE and WebSockets and points to a planned WebSockets book. The full arc is below.
Part 0 — Prerequisites & the Lab
Part 1 — Why GraphQL & the Decision Lens
Part 2 — The Schema: SDL & the Type System
- Ch3 · SDL and the type system in depth
- Ch4 · Nullability and null propagation
- Ch5 · Schema-first / contract-first