Since GraphQL was announced by Facebook in 2015 it has started to gain quite a bit of traction with many companies such as Github looking to adopt it to either replace or complement their existing REST APIs. GraphQL provides a powerful way for the frontend to be able to query data sources and your business logic, giving and receiving only the data that they need, without having to always have custom designed endpoints for every use-case. As a consumer of third party APIs it probably won't be long before you're consuming a GraphQL API; and as a designer or creator of APIs, GraphQL can sometimes provide a better alternative than a REST API. Join me for a tour of what GraphQL looks like, what it works well for, how to consume a GraphQL API, and how to easily design and create one in PHP.