So, in principle I like everything with David's new approach... the main questio...

spion · on July 8, 2015

Thats indeed something that doesn't seem to be discussed much, even if you look at graphql's presentation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQLzZf34FJ8 there seems to be a lot of redundancy when "my friends including their events" is fetched.

I imagine that a scheme based on an UUID and deduplication would work - when constructing the response an object repository is kept and if an object with the same uuid appears twice its replaced with a reference to them.

Going against the "don't extend JSON" best practice, that would be:

  {
    "friends": [{ 
      "name": "Name", 
      "events": [#uuid1, #uuid2]
    }, {
      "name": "Another name",
      "events": [#uuid1, #uuid2]
    }],
  }
  #{
    "uuid1": {"name": "MyEvent", "description": "..."},
    "uuid2": {"name": "OtherEvent", "description": "..."},
  }

And it can support cyclic references too, as a bonus. Ignoring best practices is so... liberating.

Ultimately this is just compression though. Its possible that gzip will be quite sufficient for most cases.

emidln · on July 8, 2015

Transit [1] can do this for you.

[1] https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format