Follow Datanami:
March 12, 2019

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

HALF MOON BAY, Calif., March 12, 2019 — 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, PayPal, 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 specificationGraphQL.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.

The GraphQL Foundation

The GraphQL Foundation is an open, neutral organization that provides oversight of funding,  operations, and marketing resources for the GraphQL community to enable widespread adoption and help accelerate development of the broader ecosystem. The GraphQL specificationGraphQL.js reference implementation, DataLoader library, and GraphiQL developer tool are technical projects supported by the GraphQL Foundation. More details can be found at https://foundation.graphql.org/.

About the Joint Development Foundation

The Joint Development Foundation, which has joined the Linux Foundation Family, is an independent nonprofit organization that provides the corporate and legal infrastructure to enable groups to establish and operate standards and source code development collaborations.

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.


Source: The Linux Foundation

Datanami