Is there any GraphQL support? about searchkit

[joemcelroy]

Hi there,

Short answer: No, not in v4.

In Searchkit V3, GraphQL was at the core. Unfortunately I spent most of my time teaching GraphQL basics and was hard for developers to adopt. The other challenge is making the searchkit module easy to plug into your graphql server of choice. There was little traction in modules at the time. That might not be the case today.

I decided to keep things simple with v4 and focused on just making it a layer to build search applications quickly, adopting instantsearch as the view layer. It has been successful as instantsearch is a great library and i've been able to surpass capability of v3 quickly. Its easier to maintain and alot of "how do I do x" is solved with instantsearch ecosystem of documentation and examples.

Maybe the next step is a good typescript "high level client" SDK, so its easy to build your own resolvers + REST APIs and continue to have an adapter for Instantsearch that works with the SDK. As mentioned, im conscious of not wanting to support a project that has a million features but a good SDK will help a good chunk of devs who dont want to use instantsearch.

Joe

[wyxcoder]

Hi Joe,

Thanks for you detail reply.

I am pretty new here, I wonder if you can confirm my understand here. So InstantSearch is an UI Lib that is created to work with Algolia server. And you created SearchKit so the InstandSearch can connect to ElasticSearch server.

[joemcelroy]

Correct @wyxcoder - its an adapter which allows you to use instantsearch with Elasticsearch and not need Algolia.

[wyxcoder]

@joemcelroy Thanks! That is what I got. I actually have a legacy SQL server DB in backend, I thought I will just add a GraphQL to it and then use the popular frontend React.
Maybe I should use your SearchKit V3.
Just checked the server component of NextJS 13, it seems the React front end plus API is not the only option now. Instead maybe I can just connect NextJS server side to SQL server directly without any API.