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 GraphQL with Mocha

We must verify that all the API functions we're offering work correctly. I'm going to show you how to do this with two examples:

  • The user needs to sign up or log in. This is a critical feature where we should verify that the API works correctly.
  • The user queries or mutates data via the GraphQL API. For our test case, we will request all chats the logged-in user is related to.

Those two examples should explain all the essential techniques to test every part of your API. You can add more functions that you want to test at any point.

Testing the authentication

We extend the authentication tests of our test with the signup functionality. We're going to send a simple GraphQL request to...