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

Debugging with the Apollo Client Devtools

Whenever you write or extend your own application, you have to test, debug, and log different things during development. In Chapter 1, Preparing Your Development Environment, we looked at the React Developer Tools for Chrome, while in Chapter 2, Setting Up GraphQL with Express.js, we explored Postman for testing APIs. Now, let's take a look at another tool.

The Apollo Client Devtools is another Chrome extension, allowing you to send Apollo requests. While Postman is great in many ways, it does not integrate with our application and does not implement all GraphQL-specific features. The Apollo Client Devtools rely on the Apollo Client that we set up very early on in this chapter.

Every request, either a query or mutation, is sent through the Apollo Client of our application. The developer tools also provide features such as autocomplete, for writing requests. They can show us the schema as it is implemented in our GraphQL API, and...