Microservices & Federation

ObjectQL provides a built-in mechanism to aggregate data from multiple services into a single unified graph. This is similar to GraphQL Federation or Salesforce's External Objects, but strictly for the ObjectQL protocol.

Concept: Remote Remotes

You can configure an ObjectQL instance to act as a Gateway. It connects to other ObjectQL instances, downloads their metadata (Schema), and automatically creates proxy drivers for them.

Source of Truth: The microservice defines the object (user.object.yml).
Proxy: The gateway sees a virtual object (user) and forwards all queries (Find, Update, Actions) to the microservice.

Configuration

The Subgraph (Service A)

This is a standard ObjectQL service running standard drivers (SQL/Mongo). It must expose the metadata API (default in @objectql/server).

// user-service/index.ts
const app = new ObjectQL({
    source: './src/objects', // Defines 'user', 'role'
    datasources: { ... }
});
// Exposes http://user-service:3000/api/metadata/objects

The Gateway

The gateway aggregates multiple services.

// gateway/index.ts
const app = new ObjectQL({
    // No local source needed, just remotes
    remotes: [
        'http://user-service:3000',
        'http://order-service:3000'
    ]
});
 
await app.init();

Usage

Once initialized, the Gateway behaves exactly like a monolith.

// Code running on Gateway
// Transparently forwards request to User Service via HTTP
const users = await app.object('user').find({
    filters: [['status', '=', 'active']]
});

Benefits

Decoupling: Services manage their own schema migrations and domain logic.
Unity: Frontend or upper layers see a single API surface.
Hybrid: A Gateway can also have local objects. You can mix "local cache tables" with "remote live tables" in the same application.