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)

Connecting to The Database

Our back end and front end can communicate, create new posts, and respond with a list of all posts while using fake data. The next step on our list will be to use a database, such as an SQL server, to serve as data storage.

We want our backend to persist data to our SQL database by using Sequelize. Our Apollo Server should use this data for queries and mutations, as needed. In order for this to happen, we must implement database models for our GraphQL entities.

This chapter will cover the following points:

  • Using databases with GraphQL
  • Using Sequelize in Node.js
  • Writing database models
  • Performing database migrations with Sequelize
  • Seeding data with Sequelize
  • Using Apollo together with Sequelize