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

Mutating data with Apollo Client

We have replaced the way we get data in our client. The next step is to switch the way in which we create new posts, too. Before Apollo Client, we had to add new fake posts to the array of demo posts manually, within the memory of the browser. Now, everything in our text area is sent with the addPost mutation to our GraphQL API, through Apollo Client.

As with the GraphQL queries, there is a useMutation Hook that you can use to send a mutation against our GraphQL API. Before, there was also an HOC method and a separate Mutation component, which have been deprecated as well. They still exist for backward compatibility, but we will not cover them in this book.

Apollo useMutation Hook

The newest version of Apollo Client comes with the useMutation Hook. The method works equally to the useQuery Hook—you just need to pass the parsed mutation string to it. In response to that, the useMutation Hook will return a function equally named to the...