Plans for "generic Relay"

[KyleAMathews]

In the blog post introducing Relay, @josephsavona said, "We're working to extend Relay to provide a unified interface for interacting not only with server data, but also in-memory and native device data (and, even better, a mix of all three)."

I was curious to hear more about what that means exactly :)

Does this mean you'd like Relay to replace Flux at Facebook? Will you be able to create client-side only GraphQL types that you can query/mutate client side?

Any plans to do stuff like time-traveling debugging, user state saving/restoring, etc.?

[josephsavona]

Thanks for asking! Note that issue #114 gives an overview of this feature and is intended as a place to gather feedback from the community about additional use-cases. I'll address your specific questions here though:

Does this mean you'd like Relay to replace Flux at Facebook?

Short answer: no. Note that Relay is an implementation of the Flux pattern (can Flux replace itself? ;-). Consider that mutations are effectively asynchronous action creators, payloads from the server are actions, and the cache is a single integrated store. Our goal is to solve product use-cases that require interacting with data from multiple (potentially async) sources.

Will you be able to create client-side only GraphQL types that you can query/mutate client side?

Yup, that's the basic idea - see more on #114.

Any plans to do stuff like time-traveling debugging, user state saving/restoring, etc.?

Our short-term goals are to provide development tools for Relay and to facilitate offline operation. We're not specifically planning to implement time-traveling debugging, for example, but we absolutely appreciate the value of these kinds of tools. Having an initial version of Relay dev tools could be a great place for the community to get involved on building these features.

[josephsavona]

@KyleAMathews We're always interested in feedback and if this plan addresses any use-cases you might have been thinking of. Also, I should clarify that while our goal isn't to "replace Flux", implementing this feature could allow us to replace generic variations of Flux in a lot of places.

[gyzerok]

@KyleAMathews you can use GraphQL client-side today.

[KyleAMathews]

👍 Thanks @josephsavona! I'll close this issue in lieu of #114