Book Image

Full-Stack Web Development with GraphQL and React - Second Edition

By : Sebastian Grebe
Book Image

Full-Stack Web Development with GraphQL and React - Second Edition

By: Sebastian Grebe

Overview of this book

React and GraphQL, when combined, provide you with a very dynamic, efficient, and stable tech stack to build web-based applications. GraphQL is a modern solution for querying an API that represents an alternative to REST and is the next evolution in web development. This book guides you in creating a full-stack web application from scratch using modern web technologies such as Apollo, Express.js, Node.js, and React. First, you’ll start by configuring and setting up your development environment. Next, the book demonstrates how to solve complex problems with GraphQL, such as abstracting multi-table database architectures and handling image uploads using Sequelize. You’ll then build a complete Graphbook from scratch. While doing so, you’ll cover the tricky parts of connecting React to the backend, and maintaining and synchronizing state. In addition to this, you’ll also learn how to write Reusable React components and use React Hooks. Later chapters will guide you through querying data and authenticating users in order to enable user privacy. Finally, you’ll explore how to deploy your application on AWS and ensure continuous deployment using Docker and CircleCI. By the end of this web development book, you'll have learned how to build and deploy scalable full-stack applications with ease using React and GraphQL.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Building the Stack
5
Section 2: Building the Application
14
Section 3: Preparing for Deployment

Running Apollo queries with SSR

By nature, GraphQL queries via HttpLink are asynchronous. We have implemented a loading component to show the user a loading message while the data is being fetched.

This is the same thing that is happening while rendering our React code on the server. All of the routing is evaluated, including whether we are logged in. If the correct route is found, all GraphQL requests are sent. The problem is that the first rendering of React returns the loading state, which is sent to the client by our server. The server does not wait until the GraphQL queries are finished and it has received all of the responses to render our React code.

We will fix this problem now. The following is a list of things that we have to do:

  • We need to implement authentication for the SSR Apollo Client instance. We already did this for the routing, but now, we need to pass the cookie to the server-side GraphQL request too.
  • We need to use a React Apollo-specific method...