Relay Framework

Using Relay

If we’re looking for a more opinionated, prepackaged GraphQL framework for our application, Relay is the gold standard. With an API that’s been reimagined since its initial release in 2015, it’s lighter, faster, and easier to use than before. Relay Modern, as it’s called, is worth a serious look when we evaluate a GraphQL framework for our application.

Let’s reimplement our PlateSlate user interface using Relay Modern. As with our Apollo example in the previous section, we use the create-react-app package to build the boilerplate for our new Relay application. This saves us time:

create-react-app plate-slate-relay-ui

Once our application is generated, we can verify that the development server is working correctly by going into the directory and running yarn start:

cd plate-slate-relay-ui
yarn start