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)

Implementing chats and messages

In the previous chapter, we programmed a pretty dynamic way of creating chats and messages with your friends and colleagues, either one-on-one or in a group. There are some things that we have not discussed yet, such as authentication, real-time subscriptions, and friend relationships. First, however, we are going to work on our new skills, using React with Apollo Client to send GraphQL requests. It is a complicated task, so let's get started.

Fetching and displaying chats

Our news feed is working as we expected. Now, we also want to cover chats. As with our feed, we need to query for every chat that the current user (or, in our case, the first user) is associated with.

The initial step...