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

Authentication with Apollo subscriptions

In Chapter 6, Authentication with Apollo and React, we implemented authentication through the local storage of your browser. The backend generates a signed JWT that the client sends with every request inside the HTTP headers. In Chapter 9, Implementing Server-Side Rendering, we extended this logic to support cookies to allow SSR. Now that we've introduced WebSockets, we need to take care of them separately, as we did with the SRR and our GraphQL API.

How is it possible for the user to receive new messages when they aren't authenticated on the backend for the WebSocket transport protocol?

The best way to figure this out is to have a look at your browser's developer tools. Let's assume that we have one browser window where we log in with user A. This user chats with another user, B. Both send messages to each other and receive the new updates directly in their chat window. Another user, C, shouldn't be able to receive...