Leaving technical preview

After over a year of being open sourced we’re bringing GraphQL out of “technical preview” and relaunching graphql.org.

For us at Facebook, GraphQL isn’t a new technology. GraphQL has been delivering data to mobile News Feed since 2012. Since then it’s expanded to support the majority of the Facebook mobile product and evolved in the process.

Early last year when we first spoke publicly about GraphQL we received overwhelming demand to share more about this technology. That sparked an internal project to revisit GraphQL, make improvements, draft a specification, produce a reference implementation you could use to try it out, and build new versions of some of our favorite tools, like GraphiQL. We moved quickly, and released parts that were ready along the way.

Part of Facebook’s open source philosophy is that we want to only open source what is ready for production. While it’s true that we had been using GraphQL in production at Facebook for years, we knew that these newly released pieces had yet to be proven. We expected feedback. So we carefully released GraphQL as a “technical preview.”

Exactly one year ago, we published graphql.org, with a formal announcement that GraphQL was open source and ready to be “technically previewed”. Since then, we’ve seen GraphQL implemented in many languages, and successfully adopted by other companies. That includes today’s exciting announcement of the GitHub GraphQL API, the first major public API to use GraphQL.

In recognition of the fact that GraphQL is now being used in production by many companies, we’re excited to remove the “technical preview” moniker. GraphQL is production ready.

We’ve also revamped this website, graphql.org, with clearer and more relevant content in response to some the most common questions we’ve received over the last year.

We think GraphQL can greatly simplify data needs for both client product developers and server-side engineers, regardless of what languages you’re using in either environment, and we’re excited to continue to improve GraphQL, support the already growing community, and see what we can build together.