IBM’s first acquisition of the year could help GraphQL developers

IBM has acquired StepZen, a company aimed at making it easier for developers to build GraphQL application programming interfaces (APIs) and improving the performance of tools that use REST APIs.

GraphQL is a query language for working with APIs developed by Facebook, Open sourced in 2015. Today’s Project Hosted by Linux Foundationis growing in popularity and is a popular alternative to REST APIs for service integration via graph-based programming.

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StepZen — IBM’s first acquisition in 2023 — adds to IBM’s API offerings, including API Connect API management services. Founded by a former IBMer, StepZen has developed a GraphQL server that helps developers build their GraphQL APIs with less code. Essentially, this is a managed GraphQL service.

Bill Lobig, vice president of product management at IBM Automation, told ZDNet that GraphQL is helping organizations access application data across diverse IT infrastructures. Developers prefer it because it is a more efficient method of retrieving data than REST.

“GraphQL has emerged as an alternative and complement to REST APIs because it enables declarative data fetching through a single API endpoint that returns the specific data you need from multiple sources. It’s ideal for use cases that require a specific set of data to work with and/or data that needs to be stitched together from multiple sources,” explains Lobig.

“One of the challenges surrounding modern application development is that organizations have so many options for where to deploy and run their applications (on-premises, in the cloud, or using hybrid cloud models), and the variety of data structures and hosting. For example, we have transactional, data warehouse, data lake, and data lakehouse options,” added Lobig.

“One trend that is helping organizations address the complexity of accessing data and application ecosystems in these diverse and distributed environments is graph-based programming popularized by GraphQL.”

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according to The State of GraphQL Research in 2022the most popular language to write GraphQL backends is TypeScript/JavaScript, but some developers also use Go, Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, Rust, Elixir, and Kotlin.