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Overview

The graph query engine is a Rust backend application powered by the rocket web framework and the SeaQL ecosystem.

Handling requests​

Being a web application, StarfishQL expects input from the web in the form of HTTP requests (specifically, POST requests only).

We defined the query language in the JSON format, because:

  • It is the go-to format for data transmission on the web.
  • Most, if not all, web developers know it.
  • Most, if not all, web frameworks support it.
  • It is easy to understand (arguable, but prettify and visualization tools surely help).
  • It is easy to write (even trivial if the request sender uses JavaScript).
  • serde and serde_json provide nice tools for dealing with JSON data in Rust.

As such, we've designed the input layer of the engine to always take the JSON-formatted body of a POST request1, regardless of the operation, for consistency.

The engine listens at the following endpoints for the corresponding operation:

  • /schema - Define/Reset the schema
  • /mutate - Perform mutate operations
  • /query - Perform queries

Invoking operations​

Each request received by the engine at different endpoints tells the engine what to do, while the body specifies how to do it with parameters.

In the following sub-sections, each possible operation that StarfishQL's query engine supports will be investigated in details.

  1. As per the standards, GET requests do not have bodies. So please don't feel too surprised to see query operations specified in POST requests.↩