Early this year, the Apollo team began development on a new tool for navigating your graph and building GraphQL queries. Unlike many tools that seem m

Introducing the Apollo Explorer

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2020-06-30 18:06:00

Early this year, the Apollo team began development on a new tool for navigating your graph and building GraphQL queries. Unlike many tools that seem more focused on server developers, our goal was to create a powerful, accessible, and intuitive experience for graph consumers—the product engineering teams that spend their days working with a production data graph.

The Explorer is a full-featured query builder and runner that’s part of Apollo Studio (which we renamed from Graph Manager just yesterday 🙂). This is the first Studio feature that’s first and foremost built for graph consumers. You can use the Explorer with every graph that’s part of your Studio organization, and with every environment those graphs run in (staging, production, and so on). Powerful features like dynamic field selection, intelligent search, and built-in documentation help your team members compose exactly the query they need.

From the outset, we wanted the Explorer to just “feel right” to use. It includes a ton of small design touches that someone might not consciously notice, but together they create a genuinely magical user experience. We’ll cover a few of those touches on our tour.