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)

Notifications with Apollo Subscriptions

In this section, I'll quickly guide you through the second use case for subscriptions. Showing notifications to a user are traditional events that a user should see as you know from Facebook. Instead of relying on the subscribeToMore function, we use the Subscription component that's provided by Apollo. This component works like the Query and Mutation components, but for subscriptions.

Follow these steps to get your first Subscription component running:

  1. Create a subscriptions folder inside the client's components folder. You can save all subscriptions that you implement using Apollo's Subscription component inside this folder.
  2. Insert a messageAdded.js file into the folder and paste in the following code:
import React, { Component } from 'react';
import { Subscription } from 'react-apollo';
import gql...