In today's fast-changing world of software development, it is necessary to stay up-to-date with shifts in technology. Keeping up with these changes benefit the software development life cycle and improve developer workflow and the quality of an end product. This project aims to study one of these improvements: GraphQL, a language to define APIs. This paper will also study its benefits and cost to the software development lifecycle as a whole. It is not easy to decide which products and tools to use during development. Describing how GraphQL works will help make that decision easier by laying out potential workflows, gains, and improvements. We accomplish this by describing what GraphQL is, comparing GraphQL to common strategies in REST, and identifying its benefits. In short, GraphQL is a great addition built upon a RESTful service that provides standards for code reuse and adds a layer of standardizations around API that thus far has been missing.