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)

Combining Express.js with Apollo

First things first; we need to install the Apollo and GraphQL dependencies:

npm install --save apollo-server-express graphql graphql-tools

Apollo offers an Express.js-specific package that integrates itself into the web server. There is also a standalone version without Express.js. Apollo allows you to use the available Express.js middleware. In some scenarios, you may need to offer non-GraphQL routes to proprietary clients who do not implement GraphQL or are not able to understand JSON responses. There are still reasons to offer some fallbacks to GraphQL. In those cases, you can rely on Express.js, since you are already using it.

Create a separate folder for services. A service can be GraphQL or other routes:

mkdir src/server/services/
mkdir src/server/services/graphql

Our GraphQL service must handle multiple things for initialization. Let&apos...