WunderGraph for Backend Developers

At a first glance, you might be thinking that WunderGraph wants to make Backend Developers obsolete. We say, we're a Backend as a Service (BaaS), so our goal is to push you out of your job, right?

No! Not at all, quite the opposite. While we're claiming, WunderGraph is in the BaaS market, we also claim that we're "Enterprise-grade".

What does "Enterprise-grade" actually mean?#

Enterprise-grade BaaS means that it integrates well within Enterprises. Other Backend as a Service tools force you into a specific backend solution of vendor-lock you into a proprietary database management system, Firebase with Firestore being a well known example.

WunderGraph on the other hand lets you bring your own backends in the form of GraphQL and REST APIs, and we're also working on adding other protocols as well, like gRPC, SOAP, OData and more.

We endorse custom-built backends. There's nothing better than designing an API and carefully implementing the business logic. We're all in on API design.

That said, we also offer the tools to auto-generate APIs based on a database Schema. However, these uses cases don't usually overlap with the work you're doing. Some projects work nicely with a generated API, where the focus is mainly on CRUD and not so much on custom business logic.

How does WunderGraph help Backend Developers then?#

WunderGraph sits in front of the services your write, giving you a layer of security, authentication and caching in front of your service. That's three large problems you don't have to worry about.

With WunderGraph, you can solely focus on writing the business logic and correctly implementing Authorization. With OpenID Connect being handled by the WunderGraph middleware, you can rely on using a validated JWT containing the subject of the request as well as their claims. With this information, you can implement the API without worrying too much about the other aspects of building backend applications.

File uploads are already being handled by WunderGraph, meaning you don't have to invent custom solutions if uploading files is a concern for your applications.

Finally, WunderGraph allows you to write Backends either as a REST or GraphQL API. What's important is that if you're building REST APIs, they have to be typed using OpenAPI Specification (OAS). WunderGraph will automatically introspect the OAS and add your API to the "virtual Graph", a composition of all the APIs used in an application.

We're also planning to add support for gRPC, SOAP and OData so you're able to add all the (legacy) services that might be running in your environment.

Conclusion#

WunderGraph can heavily simplify your backend development by solving a few base problems for you. API Security, Authentication, File Uploads and Caching is already handled for you.

This means less code to write, less maintenance and therefore faster delivery and more focus on the actual business logic.