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)

Preparing Your Development Environment

The application we are going to build in this book will be a simplified version of Facebook, called Graphbook.

When developing an application, being well-prepared is always a requirement. However, before starting, we need to put our stack together. In this chapter, we will explore whether or not our techniques work well with our development process, what we need before getting started, and which tools can help us when building software.

This chapter explains the architecture for our application by going through the core concepts, the complete process, and the preparation of a working React setup.

This chapter covers the following topics:

  • Architecture and technology
  • Thinking critically about how to architect a stack
  • Building the React and GraphQL stack
  • Installing and configuring Node.js
  • Setting up a React development environment with webpack, Babel, and other requirements
  • Debugging React applications using Chrome DevTools and React Developer Tools
  • Using webpack-bundle-analyzer to check the bundle size