WordPress Revolution with GraphQL
With Relay, you also get client-side data caching. For example, when you land on a blogroll page, all the data from each blog post will be fetched and stored in a client-side cache, so when you go into a blog post and then back to the blogroll page the server won’t have to fetch any data again – it’s already there!
.. What are your current biggest problems with the implementation of this new methodology?
The biggest criticism is that WordExpress doesn’t work with the majority of WordPress plugins. It’s true – any plugin you use that affects things on the front-end won’t work. You can still use plugins that affect back-end stuff, like Advanced Custom Fields, or WP-Types (which I use). The benefit, though, is that because it’s built using Node, you can use any NPM package you want, so that’s the trade-off.
Also, server-side rendering doesn’t currently work which is a big issue. Right now, you don’t get any SEO because the HTML is rendered on the fly – I’m actively working to get server-side rendering to work with Relay and GraphQL and it’s pretty close. There has been some great work in the GraphQL/Relay community to support this.