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

Uploading images to Amazon S3

Implementing file uploads and storing files is always a huge task, especially for image uploads in which the user may want to edit their files again.

For our frontend, the user should be able to drag and drop their image into a dropzone, crop the image, and then submit it when they are finished. The backend needs to accept file uploads in general, which is not easy at all. The files must be processed and then stored efficiently so that all users can access them quickly.

As this is a vast topic, the chapter only covers the basic upload of images from React, using a multipart HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) POST request to our GraphQL API, and then transferring the image to our S3 bucket. When it comes to compressing, converting, and cropping, you should check out further tutorials or books on this topic, including techniques for implementing them in the frontend and backend, since there is a lot to think about. For example, in many applications...