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)

Testing with Mocha

The problem we're facing is that we have to ensure the quality of our software without increasing the amount of manual testing. It isn't possible to recheck every feature of our software when new updates are released. To solve this problem, we're going to use Mocha, which is a JavaScript testing framework. It gives you the opportunity to run a series of asynchronous tests. If all the tests pass successfully, your application is ready for the next release.

Many developers follow the test-driven development (TDD) approach. Often, when you implement tests for the first time, they fail because the business logic that's being tested is missing. After implementing all the tests, we have to write the actual application code to meet the requirements of the tests. In this book, we haven't followed this approach, but it isn't a problem as...