Book Image

Hands-on Full-Stack Web Development with GraphQL and React

By : Sebastian Grebe
Book Image

Hands-on Full-Stack Web Development with GraphQL and React

By: Sebastian Grebe

Overview of this book

React, one of the most widely used JavaScript frameworks, allows developers to build fast and scalable front end applications for any use case. GraphQL is the modern way of querying an API. It represents an alternative to REST and is the next evolution in web development. Combining these two revolutionary technologies will give you a future-proof and scalable stack you can start building your business around. This book will guide you in implementing applications by using React, Apollo, Node.js and SQL. We'll focus on solving complex problems with GraphQL, such as abstracting multi-table database architectures and handling image uploads. Our client, and server will be powered by Apollo. Finally we will go ahead and build a complete Graphbook. While building the app, we'll cover the tricky parts of connecting React to the back end, and maintaining and synchronizing state. We'll learn all about querying data and authenticating users. We'll write test cases to verify the front end and back end functionality for our application and cover deployment. By the end of the book, you will be proficient in using GraphQL and React for your full-stack development requirements.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Real-Time Subscriptions

The GraphQL API we have built is very advanced, as is the front end. In the previous chapter, we introduced server-side rendering to our application. We provided the user with a lot of information through the news feed, chats, and profile pages. The problem we are facing now, however, is that the user currently has to either refresh the browser or we have set a pollInterval to all Query components to keep the display up to date. A better solution is to implement Apollo Subscriptions through WebSockets. This allows us to refresh the UI of the user with the newest user information in real time without manual user interaction or polling.

This chapter covers the following topics:

  • Using GraphQL with WebSockets
  • Implementing Apollo Subscriptions
  • JWT authentication with Subscriptions