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)

Apollo Subscriptions

When we started implementing Apollo in our stack, I explained how to set it up manually. As an alternative, there is the apollo-boost package, which does this for you automatically. We have now reached a point where this package cannot be used anymore since subscriptions are an advanced feature that isn't supported. If you rely on the apollo-boost package, take a look at Chapter 4, Integrating React into the Back end with Apollo, to see how to switch to a manual setup.

You can find an excellent overview and more details about Apollo Subscriptions in the official documentation at https://www.apollographql.com/docs/react/advanced/subscriptions.html.

The first step is to install all the required packages to get GraphQL subscriptions working. Install them using npm:

npm install --save graphql-subscriptions subscriptions-transport-ws apollo-link-ws

The following...