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)

Using Express.js middleware

Express.js provides great ways to write efficient back ends without duplicating code.

Every middleware function receives a request, a response, and next. It needs to run next to pass control further to the next handler function. Otherwise, you will receive a timeout. Middleware allows us to pre- or post-process the request or response object, execute custom code, and much more. We previously covered a simple example of handling requests in Express.js.

Express.js can have multiple routes for the same path and HTTP method. The middleware can decide which function should be executed.

The following code is an easy example showing what can generally be accomplished with Express.js:

  1. The root path '/' is used to catch any request.
app.get('/', function (req, res, next) {
  1. We randomly generate a number with Math.random between 1 and 10...