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)

Running Apollo queries with SSR

By nature, GraphQL queries via HttpLink are asynchronous. We have implemented a loading component to show the user a loading message while the data is being fetched.

This is the same thing that is happening while rendering our React code on the server. All of the routing is evaluated, including whether we are logged in. If the correct route is found, all GraphQL requests are sent. The problem is that the first rendering of React returns the loading state, which is sent to the client by our server. The server does not wait until the GraphQL queries are finished and it has received all of the responses to render our React code.

We will fix this problem now. The following is a list of things that we have to do:

  • We need to implement authentication for the SSR Apollo Client. We already did this for the routing, but now we need to pass the cookie to...