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)

Introduction to server-side rendering

First, you have to understand the differences between using a server-side rendered and a client-side rendered application. There are numerous things to bear in mind when transforming a pure client rendered application to support server-side rendering. The current user flow begins with requesting a standard index.html. The file includes very few things, such as a small body with one div, a head tag with some very basic meta tags, and a vital script tag that downloads the bundled JavaScript file created by webpack. The server merely serves the index.html and the bundle.js. Then, the client's browser begins processing the React markup that we wrote. When React has finished evaluating the code, we see the HTML of the application that we wanted to see. All CSS files or images are also downloaded from our server, but only when React has inserted...