Book Image

Hands-on Full-Stack Web Development with GraphQL and React

By : Sebastian Grebe
Book Image

Hands-on Full-Stack Web Development with GraphQL and React

By: Sebastian Grebe

Overview of this book

React, one of the most widely used JavaScript frameworks, allows developers to build fast and scalable front end applications for any use case. GraphQL is the modern way of querying an API. It represents an alternative to REST and is the next evolution in web development. Combining these two revolutionary technologies will give you a future-proof and scalable stack you can start building your business around. This book will guide you in implementing applications by using React, Apollo, Node.js and SQL. We'll focus on solving complex problems with GraphQL, such as abstracting multi-table database architectures and handling image uploads. Our client, and server will be powered by Apollo. Finally we will go ahead and build a complete Graphbook. While building the app, we'll cover the tricky parts of connecting React to the back end, and maintaining and synchronizing state. We'll learn all about querying data and authenticating users. We'll write test cases to verify the front end and back end functionality for our application and cover deployment. By the end of the book, you will be proficient in using GraphQL and React for your full-stack development requirements.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Preparing the final production build

We have come a long way to get here. Now is the time where we should take a look at how we currently run our application, and how we should prepare it for a production environment.

Currently, we use our application in a development environment while working on it. It is not highly optimized for performance or low bandwidth usage. We include developer functionalities with the code so that we can debug it properly. We also only generate one bundle, which is distributed at all times. No matter which page the user visits, the code for our entire application is sent to the user or browser.

For use in a real production environment, we should solve these issues. When setting the NODE_ENV variable to production, we remove most of the unnecessary development mechanics. Still, it would be great to send as little code to the user as possible to save bandwidth...