Book Image

Jumpstart Jamstack Development

By : Christopher Pecoraro, Vincenzo Gambino
Book Image

Jumpstart Jamstack Development

By: Christopher Pecoraro, Vincenzo Gambino

Overview of this book

Jamstack (JavaScript, API, and Markup) enables web developers to create and publish modern and maintainable websites and web apps focused on speed, security, and accessibility by using tools such as Gatsby, Sanity, and Netlify. Developers working with Jamstack will be able to put their knowledge to good use with this practical guide to static site generation and content management. This Jamstack book takes a hands-on approach to implementation and related methodologies that will have you up and running with modern web development in no time. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, you'll begin by building an event and venue schema structure, and then expand the functionality, exploring all that the Jamstack has to offer. You’ll learn how an example Jamstack is built, build structured content using Sanity to create a schema, use GraphQL to expose the content, and employ Gatsby to build an event website using page and template components and Tailwind CSS Framework. Lastly, you’ll deploy the website to both, a Netlify server and the Microsoft Static Web Apps Service, and interact with it using Amazon Alexa. By the end of this book, you'll have gained the knowledge and skills you need to install, configure, build, extend, and deploy a simple events website using Jamstack.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

GraphQL in GatsbyJS

In this section, we'll learn about how GraphQL is used in the context of Gatsby. We will learn what the major difference is between how GraphQL is used by Gatsby and how it is exposed by Sanity's GraphQL API.

Gatsby's use of GraphQL is different from Sanity's since it uses the concept of a graph to formulate its GraphQL queries. Let's learn what a graph is.

In the following diagram, the figure consists of nodes and edges:

Figure 8.1 – A graph

In Gatsby's implementation of GraphQL, in reference to the graph, each Sanity document is represented as a node. Recalling the GraphQL query that was used in Chapter 6, Sanity's GraphQL Playground, to return all events, this query was quite simple, as highlighted in the following code snippet:

{
  allEvent {
    name
  }
}

In Gatsby, we find that the corresponding query to return all events has two main differences...