We are introducing Metatype, a new project that allows developers to build modular and strongly typed APIs using typegraph as a programmable glue.
What is Metatype?
Metatype is an open platform for developers to declaratively build APIs. It offers a new approach to creating backends, where the developers focus on data modelling and delegate the implementation to the platform.
The intent is to address the following challenges:
- developers are often a bottleneck, and may spend less than 50% of their time on tasks that matter
- most of the developments needs are similar, yet most of the systems are not interoperable
- infrastructure management takes time and slows down the deployment velocity
The platform is composed of the following components:
- Typegraph: a multi-language SDK to manage typegraphs - virtual graphs of types - and compose them
- Typegate: a serverless REST/GraphQL gateway to execute queries over typegraphs
- Meta CLI: a command-line tool to offer a great developer experience and fast deployment
What are virtual graphs?
Typegraphs are a declarative way to expose all APIs, storage and business logic of your stack as a single graph. They take inspiration from domain-driven design principles and in the idea that the relation between of the data is as important as data itself, even though they might be in different locations or shapes.
These elements can then be combined and composed together similarly on how you would compose web components to create an interface in modern frontend practices. This allows developers to build modular and strongly typed APIs using typegraph as a programmable glue.
Where does this belong in the tech landscape?
Before Metatype, there was a gap in the technological landscape for a solution that specifically addressed the transactional, short-lived use cases. While there were existing tools for analytical or long-running use cases, such as Trino and Temporal, there was no generic engine for handling transactional, short-lived tasks.
| ← individual level transactional | large data → analytical | |
| instantaneous ↑ short-lived | Metatype query engine for data entities in evolving systems | Trino query engine for large data from multiples sources |
| long-running asynchronous ↓ | Temporal workflow orchestration engine for data operations | Spark batch/streaming engine for large data processing |
Give it a try!
Let us know what you think! Metatype is open source and we welcome any feedback or contributions. The community primarily lives on GitHub.
Build your first typegraph or read more about the concepts behind Metatype.