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According to the GraphQL Foundation, GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data. Like many influential technologies, GraphQL was developed by Facebook in 2012. In their own words they “needed a data-fetching API powerful enough to describe all of Facebook, yet simple enough to be easy to learn” by their developers.

For a few years, GraphQL was used internally for their mobile applications. The first GraphQL repos were open-sourced in 2015. One of the Github repos contained the GraphQL specification and another contained a GraphQL JavaScript reference implementation. 

Source: DZone