Book Image

Professional JavaScript

By : Hugo Di Francesco, Siyuan Gao, Vinicius Isola, Philip Kirkbride
Book Image

Professional JavaScript

By: Hugo Di Francesco, Siyuan Gao, Vinicius Isola, Philip Kirkbride

Overview of this book

In depth knowledge of JavaScript makes it easier to learn a variety of other frameworks, including React, Angular, and related tools and libraries. This book is designed to help you cover the core JavaScript concepts you need to build modern applications. You'll start by learning how to represent an HTML document in the Document Object Model (DOM). Then, you'll combine your knowledge of the DOM and Node.js to create a web scraper for practical situations. As you read through further lessons, you'll create a Node.js-based RESTful API using the Express library for Node.js. You'll also understand how modular designs can be used for better reusability and collaboration with multiple developers on a single project. Later lessons will guide you through building unit tests, which ensure that the core functionality of your program is not affected over time. The book will also demonstrate how constructors, async/await, and events can load your applications quickly and efficiently. Finally, you'll gain useful insights into functional programming concepts such as immutability, pure functions, and higher-order functions. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills you need to tackle any real-world JavaScript development problem using a modern JavaScript approach, both for the client and server sides.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Introduction to GraphQL Language Schemas and Queries

GraphQL is a query language. It exposes a typed schema to run queries against. The massive benefit of GraphQL is that the client requests what information it needs. This is a direct effect of having a typed schema.

We will add GraphQL to our BFF using express-graphql, which is compatible with micro. We need to provide our GraphQL endpoint with a schema and resolvers so that it can respond to client requests. Such a server is provided in the Exercise 12 start file (change the working directory to Lesson10, run npm install followed by npm run Exercise81, and navigate to http://localhost:3000 to see it in action).

A sample GraphQL query that returns a basket can work within the following GraphQL schema definition. Note how we have three types, that is, Query, basket, and basketItem. A basket contains a list of basketItems under an items property. The query contains the top-level GraphQL query fields, which in this case is just...