I spun up a Falcor system at my last startup. We had this legacy REST API where the payloads had gotten quite large. A user contains a follower list, which in turn contains other users, which in turn contain other entities, etc. It was a mess, and quite slow.
The plan was to have a new REST API without these nested entities. Yes, that means you have to make lots of little calls to the REST API, but since a payload now represented one thing only, server-side caching was vastly simplified. And, we had a Falcor router which essentially batched these calls between the client and server.
So the the client hits the Falcor router, which in turns calls the REST API over localhost, in parallel, several times. As the front-end evolved, the REST API no longer had to try to restructure its responses to cater to the new views. The incoming batch calls would just change. This in my view was the true win of the whole deal.
It worked beautifully! The fly in the ointment was that there were/are no Java or Swift clients for Falcor, so while our Angular app was humming along happily in Falcor La-La land, our mobile clients were still talking to the legacy REST endpoints. We tried standing up some clever Falcor-like batching endpoints for the mobile folks, but they understandably wanted to stick to their fat endpoints.
Meanwhile, Netflix has repeatedly stated that iOS and Android client software is not on the horizon. They've actually gotten really quiet on the Falcor front in the last year. I think the team is under-resourced at the moment, unfortunately.
The plan was to have a new REST API without these nested entities. Yes, that means you have to make lots of little calls to the REST API, but since a payload now represented one thing only, server-side caching was vastly simplified. And, we had a Falcor router which essentially batched these calls between the client and server.
So the the client hits the Falcor router, which in turns calls the REST API over localhost, in parallel, several times. As the front-end evolved, the REST API no longer had to try to restructure its responses to cater to the new views. The incoming batch calls would just change. This in my view was the true win of the whole deal.
It worked beautifully! The fly in the ointment was that there were/are no Java or Swift clients for Falcor, so while our Angular app was humming along happily in Falcor La-La land, our mobile clients were still talking to the legacy REST endpoints. We tried standing up some clever Falcor-like batching endpoints for the mobile folks, but they understandably wanted to stick to their fat endpoints.
Meanwhile, Netflix has repeatedly stated that iOS and Android client software is not on the horizon. They've actually gotten really quiet on the Falcor front in the last year. I think the team is under-resourced at the moment, unfortunately.