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)

Implementing Server-Side Rendering

With our progress from the last chapter, we are now serving multiple pages under different paths with our React application. All of the routing happens directly on the client. In this chapter, we will look at the advantages and disadvantages of server-side rendering. By the end of the chapter, you will have configured Graphbook to serve all pages as pre-rendered HTML from the server instead of the client.

This chapter covers the following topics:

  • An introduction to server-side rendering
  • Setting up Express.js to render React on the server
  • Enabling JWT authentication in connection with server-side rendering
  • Running all GraphQL queries in the React tree