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)

Documenting React applications

We have put a lot of work and code into our React application. To be honest, we can improve upon our code base by documenting it. We did not comment on our code, we did not add React component property type definitions, and we have no automated documentation tool. Of course, we did not write any comments because you learned all of the techniques and libraries from the book, so no comments were needed. However, be sure to always comment your code outside of this book.

In the JavaScript ecosystem, many different approaches and tools exist to document your application. For this book, we will use a tool called React Styleguidist. It was made especially for React. You cannot document other frameworks or code with it.

Generally speaking, this is an area that you can put months of work into without coming to a real end. If you are searching for a general...