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Roy Derks
Roy Derks

Posted on • Edited on • Originally published at stepzen.com

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StepZen Community Update May 2022

What's new with StepZen this month? Every first Thursday of the month, the StepZen team shares the latest updates to StepZen in a livestream. This month's update includes a PlanetScale integration, a tutorial contributed from the community, federation for GraphQL, and a sneak peek at new product updates coming next month!

Watch a recording of the May 2022 Community Update on YouTube.

PlanetScale integration

With StepZen, you can create a GraphQL API for your existing data sources in minutes and deploy it in seconds. One of those data sources is MySQL databases, which you can import using stepzen import mysql with our CLI. This command also lets you import a PlanetScale database, a MySQL-compatible database that you can use in the cloud. PlanetScale allows you to create a serverless database based on Vitess, an open-source project that is powering tools like Slack and New Relic.

Read the full blog post explaining how to set up PlanetScale and import a MySQL database in Instant GraphQL API for PlanetScale with StepZen. Or find the code in our examples repository on Github.

Community tutorial

We have a new community tutorial this month, written by Victory Nwani. In this tutorial, he shows how to build a fullstack GraphQL application using StepZen and Svelte. StepZen is used to make the GraphQL backend by importing REST API endpoints from AlpacaDB using stepzen import curl. As AlpacaDB has no GraphQL API, this is a perfect way to use GraphQL in your frontend application without setting up a complete GraphQL API with code yourself. One of the latest popular front-end frameworks, Svelte, is used to create the JavaScript frontend.

You can find a link to the tutorial here, and the complete source code is available in this Github repository.

Using StepZen for federation

Federation is becoming more and more popular amongst larger enterprises to set up a "graph of graphs" for their organization. Using StepZen, you can declaratively create subgraphs and sssemble them in a unified graph of graphs (or supergraph). You can create graphs for your existing non-GraphQL services using the StepZen CLI (stepzen import mysql|postgresql|curl) and connect them with any service that's using GraphQL already. You can use a set of custom directives (@materializer and @sequence) to combine data from different subgraphs declaratively. To learn more about using StepZen for federation, go to our federation product page or watch the walkthrough on YouTube.

What's next?

We're adding more and more features to StepZen. Next month you can expect more product features that will help you build a GraphQL API faster using declarative code. Keep an eye out for our latest developments on Twitter or join our Discord community to stay updated. The next StepZen Community Update will be hosted on the first Thursday of June, meaning June 2nd. Livestreamed on YouTube and Twitch, or watch the recording afterward.

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