Book Image

Elevating React Web Development with Gatsby

Book Image

Elevating React Web Development with Gatsby

Overview of this book

Gatsby is a powerful React static site generator that enables you to create lightning-fast web experiences. With the latest version of Gatsby, you can combine your static content with server-side rendered and deferred static content to create a fully rounded application. Elevating React Web Development with Gatsby provides a comprehensive introduction for anyone new to GatsbyJS and will help you get up to speed in no time. Complete with hands-on tutorials and projects, this easy-to-follow guide starts by teaching you the core concepts of GatsbyJS. You'll then discover how to build performant, accessible, and scalable websites with the GatsbyJS framework. Once you've worked through the practical projects in the book, you'll be able to build anything from a personal website to large-scale applications with authentication and make your site rise through those SEO rankings. By the end of this Gatsby development book, you'll be well-versed in every aspect of the tool's performance and accessibility and have learned how to build client websites that your users will love.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started
7
Part 2: Going Live
12
Part 3: Advanced Concepts

Introducing GraphQL

GraphQL is a specification for querying data – general guidelines on how to query data efficiently. This specification was developed by engineers at Facebook in 2012 while working on their mobile application's REST services. They wanted to use their existing REST service on their mobile platforms, but it was going to require heavy modification and specific logic for mobile platforms in various areas of their APIs. The engineers also noticed that there were lots of data points in the responses to their API requests that they were not using. This meant that people with low network bandwidth were loading data they weren't even using.

So, the team at Facebook started to work on GraphQL to solve these problems and rethink the way they could fetch data for devices. GraphQL shifted the focus from the backend engineers specifying what data is returned by what request, to the frontend developers specifying what they need.

GraphQL for Gatsby

Gatsby...