Tradeoffs between leveraging FHIR REST APIs vs. GraphQL APIs
summary
Compares REST vs GraphQL for read-only, interactive FHIR use cases and reports a working GraphQL server built in Go with gqlgen and DynamoDB, using heavy code generation that forced a switch from explicit unions to a generic reference type to avoid compile bloat. Implements cursor pagination (GraphQL-style), a custom filter syntax inspired by Dgraph, and a small, opt-in set of search params; notes missing GraphQL-with-FHIR guidance, no robust mutations, introspection/logging tradeoffs, and practical parser compatibility workarounds.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Introduction and context
- 1:29Interactive vs bulk use cases
- 3:18REST API overview and limitations
- 7:11GraphQL API advantages
- 10:22GraphQL API limitations
- 12:32Implementation challenges
- 18:10Adoption and parser issues
- 20:59Custom API decisions
- 24:48Summary of deviations
- 26:37Hot take on search parameters
- 27:38Mutations and write operations
- 29:02Choosing REST vs GraphQL
- 30:27Q&A
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