Apollo-ios: Subscription/WebSocket support is undocumented -- is it production-ready?

[stevenp]

I've been attempting to figure out how to use subscriptions in Apollo, and it seems that there's a WebSocket subspec in the Podfile that is the key to making this work. My question is whether this functionality is considered ready for production, as there isn't anything in the docs to indicate how to use it, as it isn't even mentioned.

I'm digging through the test cases now to attempt to figure it out, and I'm happy to write some documentation and open a pull request, but I want to make sure that I'm not shipping code with an experimental feature that isn't ready yet.

[aivcec]

Can you post an update on this? Were you successful in what you set out to do using apollo?

[stevenp]

I was successful in getting this to work by searching Stack Overflow, but there is still no documentation, and no answer as to whether this is production ready. Maybe @designatednerd can provide some context?

[designatednerd]

Unfortunately this predates my time on the project by a goodly ways, but I'll talk to my team and try to get some context.

[designatednerd]

In talking to the team it seems like this support was added by a community contributor, and there hasn't been a ton of time available from Apollo's end to clean this stuff up until I started about three weeks ago.

It needs better docs, but it's definitely being used out in the wild, and there is a set of tests around this. I'm going to try to get a better look at this in the medium term after fixing some other more pressing issues, but I'd say take a look through the apollo-websockets label to see if any of the known issues are dealbreakers for you.

[rval]

Thanks @designatednerd, appreciate the update.

I’m not sure what Apollo Client for iOS uses for websockets, but just a note that iOS 13 introduces built in support for websockets, in case it’s helpful for any future updates.

[designatednerd]

@rval It uses Starscream under the hood. Unfortunately we have to support several versions back (currently all the way back to 9) so it'll be a bit before we're able to use any of the New Hotness™ for iOS 13.

@stevenp Does all this feedback answer your question?

[wtrocki]

I will be cool to just add one or two sentences into docs that this is supported as I seen and hear many people deciding to not use apollo client because it is missing subscriptions which is not true.

[wtrocki]

Good post as base: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51720378/how-to-implement-graphql-subscription-using-apollo-ios-client

[designatednerd]

@stevenp @wtrocki @aivcec @rval Please check out #853 with shiny new docs on this. Would love any feedback on it y'all have.

[designatednerd]

Documentation is now merged! Please feel free to either comment on that PR or open a new issue if you see anything amiss. Thank you!

[rval]

@designatednerd The updated docs are great! Thank you for writing them.

[wtrocki]

Amazing! Really really good job!

[designatednerd]

Thanks y'all!