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)

Summary

At this point, we have set up our Node.js server with Express.js and bound Apollo Server to respond to requests on a GraphQL endpoint. We are able to handle queries, return fake data, and mutate that data with GraphQL mutations.

Furthermore, we can log every process in our Node.js server. Debugging an application with Postman leads to a well-tested API, which can be used later in our front end.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to persist data in a SQL server. We will also implement models for our GraphQL types and cover migrations for our database. We need to replace our current resolver functions with queries via Sequelize.

There is a lot to do here, so read on for more.