Deprecations

The GRANDstack starter app has been a marketing and Neo4j Labs effort to drive user adoption of the Neo4j Labs GraphQL library at its early stages.

Its main purpose was to demonstrate how the Neo4j Labs GraphQL library could be used in the context of a full-stack application using React and Apollo client. It was extremely useful when building proof of concept applications.

It was very appealing to developers who didn’t want to have additional boiler plate when setting up their application, speeding up development time and helped focussing on building the functionality of the application.

It was also attractive to junior developers with very little experience in building applications, and it was a great channel to bring a new audience to Neo4j.

Finally, it was helpful for users who had an existing front end and needed a new backend. They needed a way to initiate a server, so the value we offered was by providing an opinionated mechanism that can help users get started with Neo4j with GraphQL.

Over time, the GRANDstack starter grew to support other frameworks such as Flutter and Angular. With hindsight, this massively increased the support burden and technical debt of the product, and it is time to revisit the scope of the product.

The intention for the future is to replace this Labs project with a new starter application product, which will focus on the backend and the configuration of the GraphQL library, and we will consider options on how we might help developers with their front-end.

From a technical perspective the create-grandstack-app npm package has been marked as deprecated - it can still be used to skeleton a GRANDstack app, however the user will be warned that the package is deprecated. The associated GRANDstack starter GitHub repository has been archived, meaning that it is still available as a reference, but is now read-only. The associated npm packages (such as graphql-auth-directives and the grandstack-cli) have also been deprecated and archived on GitHub.

The main purpose of the Neo4j GraphQL Architect was to provide users with a Low-Code way to build GraphQL APIs powered by Neo4j. GraphQL Architect was a Graph App for Neo4j Desktop that enabled developers to build, query, and deploy GraphQL APIs backed by the Neo4j graph database, all from within Neo4j Desktop.

We decided it was time to give this tool a new purpose and expand its potential to attract our target audience. Successor of GraphQL Architect Graph App, the new Neo4j GraphQL Toolbox (the name is a placeholder) will be part of the GraphQL for Neo4j holistic product offering. It is currently available at https://graphql-toolbox.neo4j.io/, however we haven’t publicized it yet and we’re still writing documentation and marketing pieces on it.

The vision for this is to build an embeddable tool that we can integrate into the Neo4j workspace which will help onboarding developers into GraphQL. It’s meant to be a Low-Code GraphQL solution to get started for developers who are either new to Neo4j, or GraphQL, or both, and they’re seeking a way to get started easily and quickly with their project from scratch.

We want to make it easily configurable so that it’s at developers' fingertips ready and available for users without requiring them to have credentials to access a live Neo4j instance when they are in a prototyping stage. It’s also a great way to discover the GraphQL library capabilities. It’s very useful for debugging errors and problems users may encounter using the library so they can use the GraphQL Toolbox to reproduce the problem in GitHub issues.

We can communicate to the developers market that there is no mismatch between the API model and the data model (in the database). We are graph from top to bottom. GraphQL developers already think in graphs about their application data and features, but we need to help them understand that they can store that information in graphs (using a graph DB).

From a technical perspective we have deprecated and removed the GraphQL Architect Graph App from npm and the Graph App gallery, it is no longer available to be installed in Neo4j Desktop. The associated GitHub repositories have been archived.