Introduction to Apollo Client

Apollo is best used as a new layer in your stack that sits between your services and your applications. It’s a combination of open source components, commercial extensions, and cloud services. Apollo is an entire ecosystem built by developers as an infrastructure for GraphQL applications. Apollo is designed for the needs of product engineering teams building modern, data-driven applications. You can use it on the client-side for a GraphQL client application, or server-side for a GraphQL server application. At the time of writing this course, Apollo offers the richest and most popular ecosystem around GraphQL in JavaScript. There are other libraries for React applications like Relay and Urql, but they are just for React applications, and they are not as popular as the Apollo Client. Apollo is framework agnostic, meaning you can use it with libraries other than React. It can be coupled with other libraries/frameworks like Vue and Angular as well, so everything you learn in this course is transferable to other frameworks as well.

Some of the advantages of Apollo Client also include it being small and self-contained, so you can just npm install apollo-client react-apollo and start loading data. Also, it is compatible with all GraphQL servers.