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

Using Apollo Client in React

Apollo Client gives us everything that we need to send requests from our React components. We have already tested that the client works. Before moving on, we should clean up our file structure, to make it easier for us later in the development process. Our frontend is still displaying posts that come from static demo data. The first step is to move over to Apollo Client and fetch the data from our GraphQL API.

Follow these instructions to connect your first React component with Apollo Client:

  1. Clone the App.js file to another file, called Feed.js.
  2. Remove all parts where React Helmet is used, remove the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) import, and rename the function Feed instead of App.
  3. From the App.js file, remove all of the parts that we have left in the Feed component.
  4. Furthermore, we must render the Feed component inside of the App component. It should look like this:
    import React from 'react';
    import { Helmet } from &apos...