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)

Introducing React patterns

With any programming language, framework, or library that you use, there are always common tactics that you should follow. They present an understandable, efficient way to write applications.

In Chapter 4, Integrating React into the Back end with Apollo, we tackled some patterns, such as rendering arrays, the spread operator, destructuring objects, and higher-order components. Nevertheless, there are some further patterns that you should know about.

We will go over the most commonly used patterns that React offers, as follows:

  • Controlled components
  • Stateless functions
  • Conditional rendering
  • Rendering children

Many (but not all) of the examples here only represent illustrations of what each method looks like. Some of them will not be taken over to our real application code, so, if you are not interested in learning the essential aspects of patterns,...