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

Testing with Mocha

The problem we're facing is that we must ensure the quality of our software without increasing the amount of manual testing. It isn't possible to recheck every feature of our software when new updates are released. To solve this problem, we're going to use Mocha, which is a JavaScript testing framework that is used to run a series of asynchronous tests. If all the tests pass successfully, your application is OK and can get released to production.

Many developers follow the test-driven development (TDD) approach. Often, when you implement tests for the first time, they fail because the business logic that's being tested is missing. After implementing all the tests, we have to write the actual application code to meet the requirements of the tests. In this book, we haven't followed this approach, but it isn't a problem as we can implement tests afterward too. Typically, I tend to write tests in parallel with the application code.

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