The GraphQL Foundation Announces Collaboration with the Joint Development Foundation to Drive Open Source and Open Standards

The GraphQL Foundation, a neutral home for the GraphQL community to accelerate development of the surrounding ecosystem, today announces it is collaborating with the Joint Development Foundation (JDF), which recently joined the Linux Foundation to drive adoption of open source and standards, to continue developing the GraphQL specification.

GraphQL Foundation encourages contributions, stewardship, and a shared investment from a broad group in vendor-neutral events, documentation, tools, and support for the data query language. The following companies Apollo, AWS, Butterfly Network, Dgraph Labs, Facebook, Gatsby, GraphZen, Hasura, IBM, Intuit, Neo4j, Novvum, Pipefy, Salsify, Solo.io and Thicit are joining as members to advance GraphQL as an industry specification for designing more effective APIs.

GraphQL powers hundreds of billions of API calls a day at Facebook, which developed the technology in 2012 and played an integral role in helping GraphQL join the Linux Foundation last year. Today, virtually every major programming language offers GraphQL support through a variety of open source software libraries.

GraphQL is the first Linux Foundation project to benefit from the JDF and Linux Foundation collaboration, which provides open source projects with a swift path to standardization for open specifications. Developers will have an open GraphQL specification and open source software implementations available for designing conformant APIs.

“We are excited to formally welcome new members and to work closely with them to build out and support a global GraphQL ecosystem. We’re pleased that the GraphQL specification will continue to evolve through the JDF and Linux Foundation partnership. With an easier and faster way to create and advance standards, developers can concentrate on creating applications that make a bigger impact on communities around the world,” said Lee Byron, co-creator of GraphQL.

GraphQL is important for API development as it allows nested objects in a single API request that traditionally would require multiple API requests. The GraphQL specification, GraphQL.js reference implementation, DataLoader library, and GraphiQL developer tool are technical projects supported by the GraphQL Foundation. As application development shifts toward microservices architectures with an emphasis on flexibility and speed to market, tools like GraphQL are redefining API design and client-server interaction to improve the developer experience, increasing developer productivity and minimizing amounts of data transferred. GraphQL makes cross-platform and mobile development simpler with availability in multiple programming languages that are consistent and feature parity across multiple platforms such as web, iOS, Android, and embedded and IoT applications.

The Linux Foundation and the Facebook Open Source team leveraged the JDF’s proven framework to create a lightweight governance structure for specifications — allowing communities to quickly spin-up neutral collaborations.

“We’re thrilled to see GraphQL and the Joint Development Foundation join forces and get to work so quickly to advance open standards,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “Working with the JDF, the GraphQL community is able to leverage turnkey infrastructure to create and manage open standards more quickly and nimbly than ever before. This allows developers to continue to break barriers and modernize application development.”

“We are very pleased to have worked closely with the Linux Foundation in creating this novel approach to specification-based collaborations,” said Michael Cheng from the Facebook Open Source team. “By offering open source communities a streamlined path to standardization and nurturing open source implementations, this strategic alignment benefits GraphQL developers, corporate contributors and end users who need both outcomes to succeed.”

“We look forward to working closely with the GraphQL Foundation and we expect many other Linux Foundation projects to work with us this year to accelerate specifications and standards development to advance their mission and drive the creation of innovative technology, ” said David Rudin, president of the Joint Development Foundation.

Member Quotes#

“Given GraphQL’s centrality in the modern app development stack, the foundation we’re launching today is not just necessary, but overdue. As the creators of Apollo, the most widely used implementation of GraphQL, we’re looking forward to working together with the Linux Foundation to define appropriate governance processes and accelerate the adoption of this critical Internet standard.” — Geoff Schmidt, CEO and Co-Founder, Apollo

“GraphQL is a foundational technology for building APIs that empower frontend developers to deliver the best user experience for their customers. With AWS AppSync and the Amplify Framework, AWS is enabling developers to build and run critical GraphQL workloads at scale, and we are excited to join the Foundation to support and grow the GraphQL community.” — Adrian Cockcroft, Vice President of Cloud Architecture Strategy, AWS

“GraphQL has been invaluable to Butterfly Network in advancing our mission of democratizing medical imaging. It’s enabled us to build data-efficient APIs to serve healthcare providers in areas with limited broadband internet access, while preserving our ability to quickly develop new API functionality. GraphQL has played a key role in allowing our back end and front end teams to work together with a minimum of friction. We’re excited to support the GraphQL Foundation in its work to further shepherd the standard.” — Jimmy Jia, Principal Scientist, Butterfly Network

“Dgraph started just a few months after a draft GraphQL spec was released in mid-2015. Unsatisfied with existing graph languages, we decided to bet the future of our distributed graph database on GraphQL. Dgraph is now the only database to natively support a language very close to GraphQL. Considering how easy and intuitive it is for our users, it has been the best decision we made. So, we stand proud with the GraphQL Foundation to help build the next generation of apps on graphs.” – Manish R. Jain, CEO, Dgraph Labs

“Our goal at Gastby is to provide the best platform for building fast, compelling websites. We use GraphQL to provide a flexible data layer that can be used with different sources. We welcome the establishment of the GraphQL Specification Project and are very excited to be part of it.” — Mikhail Novikov, Software Developer, Gatsby Inc.

“GraphZen strives to deliver a fantastic developer experience for C# developers building GraphQL APIs and to provide the support and training needed by enterprises to realize the benefits of GraphQL. GraphZen is excited to join the GraphQL Foundation and steward the GraphQL specification in a way that continues to drive innovation and adoption through open standards.” — Craig Smitham, Creator & Founder, GraphZen

“The GraphQL technology and community is spearheading a much required shift in the API experience for the modern web, especially as applications are becoming more ‘frontend’ heavy. At Hasura, we’re extremely excited about the potential of GraphQL to evolve the way teams organize their codebases, and communicate with each other; especially in relation to the ongoing serverless movement. There could not be a better home for GraphQL projects and events than the GraphQL Foundation, and we are proud to do our bit to help make the technology and community around GraphQL sustainable and open.” — Tanmai Gopal, CEO, Hasura

“IBM has continued to be an industry leader, helping clients keep pace with the rapidly evolving API technologies landscape. We are pleased to join the new GraphQL Foundation as a founding member to help drive greater open source innovation and adoption of this important data access language and runtime for APIs.” – Juan Carlos Soto, VP Hybrid Cloud Integration and API Economy, IBM

“Intuit began using GraphQL shortly after it arrived in open source. We have developed a complex schema with over 600 core objects, 1,600 types and thousands of connections between objects. We’ve made major contributions to the open source GraphQL Java library. We look forward to participating in the GraphQL Foundation to advance its capabilities and more directly participate in the thriving community.” — Jeff Brewer, Vice President, Chief Architect, Small Business and Self-Employed Group, Intuit

“Neo4j is pleased to support GraphQL, due to its unique ability to enable front-end developers, API developers and data architects to all work with the same graph-based data model. Our GraphQL integration and GRANDstack have already helped thousands of developers build graph applications with Neo4j, thanks to the huge developer productivity gain of GraphQL and the graph thinking mindset it brings for both developers and API consumers. The GraphQL Foundation is an important step to cement today’s most relevant standard for building APIs and we’re honored to join as founding members to help steward GraphQL as the ecosystem continues to evolve.” — Emil Eifrem, CEO and Co-Founder, Neo4j

“We are grateful that Novvum has grown alongside GraphQL and its community over the past four years. We couldn’t be more excited about the future of GraphQL, and look forward to working with the Linux Foundation and GraphQL Foundation to improve the quality and experience of API development for engineers.” — Raj Singh, CEO and Co-Founder, Novvum

“At Pipefy we are building the lean management platform. Since the beginning, GraphQL has enabled our developers to deliver new features and services more efficiently and with better communication from front-end and back-end teams. After we started using it internally, we decided to build our public API using GraphQL, a choice that enabled us to deliver a better developer experience to the developers who are building on top of our platform. We are excited to contribute to the GraphQL ecosystem and support the GraphQL Foundation.” — Raphael Costa, Head of Platform, Pipefy

“Salsify provides a data platform that enables the world’s largest brands to deliver compelling product experiences across the retail ecosystem. Our GraphQL powered APIs enable us to support a diverse set of use cases with great developer ergonomics and excellent performance. We look forward to working with the GraphQL Foundation to support the continued evolution of GraphQL.” — Joel Turkel, Chief Software Architect, Salsify

“Solo.io’s mission is to empower enterprise organizations rapidly adopt innovative technology and extend their existing investments. GraphQL is a powerful way to help “glue” monolith, microservices, and serverless applications with a unified API. Our open-source project, Sqoop, leverages GraphQL and other innovative projects like Envoy to streamline the developer experience, and simply glue together environments without writing a single line of code. We are excited to join the GraphQL Foundation and look forward to working within the GraphQL community” — Idit Levine, CEO & Founder, Solo.io

“GraphQL, and alongside its tooling, has grown to proof its worth and is here to stay. Time for a power-up supported by many hands and brains through the Joint Development Foundation and Linux Foundation. GraphQL is the glue that keeps your domain data in context, understandable, and always ready to empower the next ideas. Looking forward to new and improved power’s, to evolution.” — Tim Govers, CEO, Thicit