Deprecate built-in GraphQL support

[JayH5]

See #619

I'm trying to do some house-keeping so that we can better maintain Starlette. We need to either put some major work into the GraphQL integration (upgrade to Graphene 3, add a bunch of stuff people want), or deprecate it. I'm in favour of the latter, since there doesn't seem to be much interest in maintaining it among @encode/maintainers (myself included).

There are currently 11 open issues and 9 pull requests related to GraphQL. Meanwhile, the last real change to GraphQLApp was in October 2019 (#623).

FastAPI does advertise GraphQL support via Starlette, but as far as I can tell doesn't actually integrate with it in any way.

This is a proposal and intended just to hopefully get the ball rolling and garner some discussion.

[JayH5]

This is to get the nice warning message to render:

[florimondmanca]

Sounds like a clear yes to me. There are already several GraphQL specific projects that support ASGI (Strawberry, Ariadne, Tartiflette) (edit: just like you wrote in the docs :)), which makes them trivial to integrate within a Starlette based app (eg via submounting). Definitely better let specialized libraries deal with GraphQL which is an entire world by itself.

[florimondmanca]

Not sure what's left to figure out to get this merge able but what's here looks good to me. :)

[erewok]

I agree that this is the right direction to go in and I support this proposal.

[JayH5]

Cool, thanks. I guess I had two things in mind before merging this:

1. Possibly refining the warning messages a bit.
2. Making sure the right people know about this.

So for 2):

• @tiangolo hi 👋 if you're around, for if/when FastAPI updates its Starlette dependency, this is something to keep in mind.
• @ciscorn hey 👋 I've linked your project in the docs here. As one of the smaller projects listed I just wanted to make sure that's okay with you? 🙂

[ciscorn]

@JayH5 No problem. Thank you! 🙂

[Kludex]

I just want to say that I'm happy with this approach and that makes a lot of sense on doing it.

Also, if this approach is followed the same way in the future, it will be cool. I'm saying this because the removal of UJSONResponse which represented a breaking change (even if it's easy to implement).

[rafalp]

[JayH5]

I've tweaked the warning messages so that the Starlette version is mentioned in the docs rather than the code (since the code is already versioned but the docs are not).

Thinking I'll keep #619 open until GraphQLApp is actually removed. Will merge this soon unless any last objections 🙂

[lightoyou]

@tiangolo can you give recommandation ? Are you going to integrate something inside fast-api ? or let's people choose ?

[mecampbellsoup]

@tiangolo can you give recommandation ? Are you going to integrate something inside fast-api ? or let's people choose ?

#1135 (comment)