Announcing the 1st GraphQL Foundation Annual Report

The GraphQL Foundation recently turned 1 year old and is happy to announce its first annual report!

The annual report details the accomplishments of the organization in its first year, along with a forward looking statement for 2020 and beyond from Lee Byron, the GraphQL Foundation Executive Director:

As the Executive Director of the GraphQL project, I hope I can speak for the whole community when I say we are looking forward to another productive year of GraphQL development. We are putting the final touches on the GraphQL 2020 spec release, and continue to make great progress developing new features, stabilizing existing ones, and exploring beyond core GraphQL.

It has been really encouraging to see GraphQL continue to evolve over the past year as a technology and as a community. GraphQL is being used at scale by not only Facebook but now a great number of organizations large and small. As I said when first introducing the project, GraphQL is unapologetically driven by the needs of the client. This has been a critical aspect of GraphQL’s success and it is great to see this principle reflect itself in our community, where those more interested in consuming APIs than producing them have come together to support the ongoing sustainability of the project.

Since establishing the GraphQL Foundation, we’ve had an outpouring of support from these companies. This neutral, non-profit home for the GraphQL project has provided a healthy way for users, contributors, and supporters to collaborate and contribute funding in support of our programs and collaborative processes. For example, this support has enabled us to support long-time contributor Ivan Goncharov to focus on crucial development and maintenance of the reference implementation, specification and other community gardening work. It has also allowed us to launch a free GraphQL edX course, and has enabled us to take some first steps toward supporting and producing community events.

Development of the GraphQL spec has remained open to all contributors. Over the last year we’ve brought more rigor and clarity to the development process. I’ve found it encouraging that contributions have been a healthy mix of aspirational new features and iterative improvements to the stable base. This demonstrates that GraphQL is evolving in meaningful ways to address exciting new use cases while also building confidence and stability around what thousands of companies use in production every day. Both of these are essential for GraphQL’s long term success.

Looking ahead, I have great optimism for GraphQL and see huge opportunities. First, we’ve been hard at work on the 2020 spec and that release is imminent. Spec development continues to accelerate and exciting advancements and improvements are underway for the 2021 release and beyond. Second, we have been accepted to participate in Google Summer of Code and are looking forward to adding these talented students as project collaborators. Third, the communities around the core GraphQL project are collaborating. For example, GraphiQL and Playground recently announced they will be joining efforts to build better tools for us all.

Thank you again for your involvement in this project and your support of the GraphQL Foundation. I am pleased with our progress and am looking forward to another productive year.

– Lee Byron, Executive Director, GraphQL Foundation, and GraphQL Co-Creator