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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Languages
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  5. GraphQL vs Markdown

GraphQL vs Markdown

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Markdown
Markdown
Stacks22.2K
Followers16.5K
Votes960
GraphQL
GraphQL
Stacks34.9K
Followers28.1K
Votes309

GraphQL vs Markdown: What are the differences?

GraphQL: A data query language and runtime. GraphQL is a data query language and runtime designed and used at Facebook to request and deliver data to mobile and web apps since 2012; Markdown: Text-to-HTML conversion tool/syntax for web writers, by John Gruber. Markdown is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.

GraphQL can be classified as a tool in the "Query Languages" category, while Markdown is grouped under "Languages".

"Schemas defined by the requests made by the user", "Will replace RESTful interfaces" and "The future of API's" are the key factors why developers consider GraphQL; whereas "Easy formatting", "Widely adopted" and "Intuitive" are the primary reasons why Markdown is favored.

GraphQL is an open source tool with 11.7K GitHub stars and 753 GitHub forks. Here's a link to GraphQL's open source repository on GitHub.

reddit, StackShare, and Asana are some of the popular companies that use Markdown, whereas GraphQL is used by Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Markdown has a broader approval, being mentioned in 756 company stacks & 718 developers stacks; compared to GraphQL, which is listed in 559 company stacks and 748 developer stacks.

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Advice on Markdown, GraphQL

Rick
Rick

founder at Webcompose.ca

May 8, 2020

Needs adviceonGitHubGitHubMarkdownMarkdownnpmnpm

I am a newbie to StackShare and the GitHub community. I want to understand how to use an include statement to get a collection of Markdown files to create a book. I have been told that there are a number of useful tools. My problem is that npm and Node.js are also very new to me. Any suggestions on how to get my md chapters into a printable document would be helpful.

80.3k views80.3k
Comments
Raj
Raj

Oct 10, 2020

Review

It purely depends on your app needs. Does it need to be scalable, do you have lots of features, OR it is a simple project with very simple needs - many of those parameters clarify which technologies will fit.

If you are looking for a quick solution, that reduces lot of development time, take a look at postgraphile (https://www.graphile.org/postgraphile/). You have to just define the schema and you get the entire graph-ql apis built for you and you can just focus on your frontend.

On frontend, React is good, but also need to remember that it is popular because it introduced one way data writes and in-built virtual dom + diffing to determine which dom to modify. Though personally I liked it, am recently more inclined to Svelte because its lightweightedness and absence of virtual dom and its simplicity compared to the huge ecosystem that React has surrounded itself with.

In all situations, frameworks keep changing over time. What is best today is not considered even good few years from now. What is important is to have the logic in a separate, clean manner void of too many framework related dependencies - that way you can switch one framework with another very easily.

3.77k views3.77k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Markdown
Markdown
GraphQL
GraphQL

Markdown is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.

GraphQL is a data query language and runtime designed and used at Facebook to request and deliver data to mobile and web apps since 2012.

-
Hierarchical;Product-centric;Client-specified queries;Backwards Compatible;Structured, Arbitrary Code;Application-Layer Protocol;Strongly-typed;Introspective
Statistics
Stacks
22.2K
Stacks
34.9K
Followers
16.5K
Followers
28.1K
Votes
960
Votes
309
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 345
    Easy formatting
  • 246
    Widely adopted
  • 194
    Intuitive
  • 132
    Github integration
  • 41
    Great for note taking
Cons
  • 2
    Cannot centralise (HTML code needed)
  • 1
    No underline
  • 1
    No right indentation
  • 1
    Non-extensible
  • 1
    Not suitable for longer documents
Pros
  • 75
    Schemas defined by the requests made by the user
  • 63
    Will replace RESTful interfaces
  • 62
    The future of API's
  • 49
    The future of databases
  • 12
    Self-documenting
Cons
  • 4
    Hard to migrate from GraphQL to another technology
  • 4
    More code to type.
  • 2
    Takes longer to build compared to schemaless.
  • 1
    All the pros sound like NFT pitches
  • 1
    Works just like any other API at runtime

What are some alternatives to Markdown, GraphQL?

JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

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