The Road To Graphql

The Road to GraphQL is your personal journey to master pragmatic GraphQL in JavaScript. The book is full with applications you are going to build along the way with React.js and Node.js. Afterward, you will be able to implement full-stack JavaScript applications. I wrote the The Road to GraphQL over the last year, while building several GraphQL applications for my clients and for myself. During this time, I came to understand the practical genius of GraphQL, and how it dramatically improves communication in client-server architectures. Not only does it improve the interface between the client and the server, it also enhances client-side state management by eliminating remote data management. Sophisticated GraphQL libraries like Apollo Client provide powerful features like caching, optimistic UI, and data prefetching for free. This book covers the fundamentals of GraphQL itself, as well as its ecosystem. I applied the same principles as my other books: Stay pragmatic Keep it simple Answer the why, not just the how Experience a problem, solve a problem This book is not intended to be an end-all reference for GraphQL APIs, nor an in-depth guide about the internals of the GraphQL specification. Instead, its purpose is to journey through learning GraphQL with JavaScript the pragmatic way, building client and server applications yourself. The book covers lots of facets about GraphQL in JavaScript that are important for building modern applications, without just throwing the libraries like Apollo at problems before experiencing them. It starts with the basic HTTP requests to perform GraphQL queries first, then moves on to using dedicated GraphQL libraries for it. You will even get the chance to implement your own GraphQL client library, so you understand how these libraries work under the hood. There are no hidden abstractions in this book, just plenty of fundamentals for JavaScript, React.js, Node.js, and GraphQL. Requirements To get the most out of this book, you should be familiar with the basics of web development, which includes some knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You will also need to be familiar with the term API, because they are discussed frequently. I encourage you to join the official Slack Group for the book, help or get help from others. React On the client-side, this book uses React to teach about GraphQL in JavaScript. My other book called The Road to learn React teaches you all the fundamentals about React. It also teaches you to make the transition from JavaScript ES5 to JavaScript ES6. The book is available for free and after having read the Road to learn React, you should possess all the knowledge to implement the GraphQL client-side application with this book. Node On the server-side, this book uses Node with Express as library to teach about GraphQL in JavaScript. You don't need to know much about those technologies before using them for your first GraphQL powered applications. The book will guide you through the process of setting up a Node application with Express and shows you how to weave GraphQL into the mix. Afterward, you should be able to consume the GraphQL API provided by your server-side application in your client-side application.

GraphQL in Action gives you the tools to get comfortable with the GraphQL language, build and optimize a data API service, and use it in a front-end client application. Summary Reduce bandwidth demands on your APIs by getting only the results you need—all in a single request! The GraphQL query language simplifies interactions with web servers, enabling smarter API queries that can hugely improve the efficiency of data requests. In GraphQL in Action, you'll learn how to bring those benefits to your own APIs, giving your clients the power to ask for exactly what they need from your server, no more, no less. Practical and example-driven, this book teaches everything you need to get started with GraphQL—from design principles and syntax right through to performance optimization. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the technology GraphQL APIs are fast, efficient, and easy to maintain. They reduce app latency and server cost while boosting developer productivity. This powerful query layer offers precise control over API requests and returns, making apps faster and less prone to error. About the book GraphQL in Action gives you the tools to get comfortable with the GraphQL language, build and optimize a data API service, and use it in a front-end client application. By working through set up, security, and error handling you'll learn to create a complete GraphQL server. You'll also unlock easy ways to incorporate GraphQL into your existing codebase so you can build simple, scalable data APIs. What's inside Define a GraphQL schema for relational and document databases Implement GraphQL types using both the schema language and object constructor methods Optimize GraphQL resolvers with data caching and batching Design GraphQL fragments that match UI components' data requirements Consume GraphQL API queries, mutations, and subscriptions with and without a GraphQL client library About the reader For web developers familiar with client-server applications. About the author Samer Buna has over 20 years of experience in software development including front-ends, back-ends, API design, and scalability. Table of Contents PART 1- EXPLORING GRAPHQL 1 Introduction to GraphQL 2 Exploring GraphQL APIs 3 Customizing and organizing GraphQL operations PART 2 - BUILDING GRAPHQL APIs 4 Designing a GraphQL schema 5 Implementing schema resolvers 6 Working with database models and relations 7 Optimizing data fetching 8 Implementing mutations PART 3 - USING GRAPHQL APIs 9 Using GraphQL APIs without a client library 10 Using GraphQL APIs with Apollo client

Why is GraphQL the most innovative technology for fetching data since Ajax? By providing a query language for your APIs and a runtime for fulfilling queries with your data, GraphQL presents a clear alternative to REST and ad hoc web service architectures. With this practical guide, Alex Banks and Eve Porcello deliver a clear learning path for frontend web developers, backend engineers, and project and product managers looking to get started with GraphQL. Youâ??ll explore graph theory, the graph data structure, and GraphQL types before learning hands-on how to build a schema for a photo-sharing application. This book also introduces you to Apollo Client, a popular framework you can use to connect GraphQL to your user interface. Explore graph theory and review popular graph examples in use today Learn how GraphQL applies database querying methods to the internet Create a schema for a PhotoShare application that serves as a roadmap and a contract between the frontend and backend teams Use JavaScript to build a fully functioning GraphQL service and Apollo to implement a client Learn how to prepare GraphQL APIs and clients for production

The Road to Firebase is your personal journey to master advanced React for business web applications in JavaScript whereas Firebase is used to replace everything that you would want from a backend application. Firebase enables you to connect your React application to a database, to authenticated users with your application with a login, logout and register mechanisms, and to authorize only certain users to access your application. It also comes with hosting capabilities and with social logins via Google, Facebook and more. Everything will be explained in the book while building a business web application yourself. I wrote the The Road to React with Firebase over the last two years. During this time, I came to understand the practical genius of Firebase, and how it dramatically reduces the tech stack to focus on getting sh*t done. Once you have set up your starter kit project -- that's what we are going to do together in this book -- you are ready to iterate fast on your personal ideas. There is no need to complicate things by adding a backend application with a database to your frontend application, because Firebase takes care of it with a well-designed API. I applied the same principles as my other books: Stay pragmatic Keep it simple Answer the why, not just the how Experience a problem, solve a problem This book is not intended to be an end-all reference for the Firebase API nor an in-depth guide about the internals of Firebase. Instead, its purpose is to journey through learning Firebase with React the pragmatic way, building an entire application on this tech stack yourself. The end result is the foundation to make your business application a reality. Requirements To get the most out of this book, you should be familiar with the basics of web development, which includes knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You will also need to be familiar with the term API, because APIs are used frequently for the applications in this book. Editor/Terminal or IDE For the development environment, use a running editor/terminal (command line tool) or IDE with integrated terminal. I will provide a setup guide if you're unsure about which tools to use. The guide is set up for MacOS users, but you can find a Windows setup guide there as well. Node and NPM You will need to have node and npm installed, which are used to run the applications we'll build and manage the libraries we'll use along the way. In this book, you will install external node packages via npm (node package manager). These node packages can be libraries or whole frameworks. You can verify which node and npm versions you have in the command line: node --version v10.11.0 npm --version v6.5.0 These are the versions used for this publication. If you don't see output in your terminal, you will need to install node and npm. React My other book, called The Road to learn React, teaches the fundamentals about React by building a real world application. It is available for free, and after having read it, you should possess all the understanding necessary to work with the application(s) from this book. Also there will be many sidenotes to React articles that may be helpful.

The book dives deeply into state management in React. You will learn everything about React's local state and state management with Redux and MobX. It comes with a lot of best practices, techniques and concepts. Along the way you will have practical hands on experiences by building own applications. The book turned out to exceed all my expectations. What started as an attempt to write a introductory book about state management in React with Redux, turned out into a full blown 250-page book which showcases MobX as alternative state management library, implements exciting applications along the way and has boilerplate projects to get you started in learning and building applications with these libraries. The bigger idea was to write a book which gives learners a consistent way to study the topic state management. I had the feeling that there exist way too many, partly inconsistent or outdated, tutorials around these topics and it is hard for learners to choose from so many opportunities. I thought, one well structured book should help newcomers to get started easily in the topic of state management with React's local state, Redux and MobX. Afterward, everyone should be on one well set level to build his/her own applications with Redux or MobX. The book teaches you how to use local state in React and scaling React applications with advanced practices, patterns and techniques. Afterward, the ebook dives into learning Redux and MobX as libraries for state management. These libraries are taught from scratch without React but in combination with React later on. However, all these learnings are not necessarily bound to React as view layer library. They can be applied in other view layer (component based) libraries, such as Vue.js, or single page application (SPA) frameworks, such as Angular.js, too. If you are new to React and want to learn React before, I recommend you to read the up to date book The Road to learn React. Due to Redux's popularity, the book teaches more about Redux than MobX. But it is planned to grow the MobX part too, because I am really into that library as well. For both state management libraries, Redux and MobX, you will learn to use them standalone, to connect them to React applications in multiple ways, and to apply best practices, patterns and tricks to scale them in larger applications. You will learn about using JavaScript ES6 to keep your state immutable, middleware in Redux, and flat and normalized state structures. Afterward, the terms actions, reducers, store(s), connected components and so on, will not be foreign subjects to you anymore. After reading the book, I believe you are ready to build your own applications in any (view layer) library or SPA framework of your choice with Redux or MobX. But when using React, you are setup with advanced knowledge about React's local state to use it in larger applications.

While GraphQL is a technology mainly driven by the needs of clients, there is a clear lack of resources on how to build reliable GraphQL servers. Over the last few years, I helped build and maintain some of the biggest GraphQL APIs out there at both Shopify and GitHub. During those years, I also worked with various companies with their adoption of GraphQL. From my experiences with GraphQL, I’ve observed the good, the bad, and the ugly. This led to many talks and blog posts on the subject, but still found that teams and individuals willing to use GraphQL in a pragmatic way lacked the resources to do so. This is what lead me to write this book: A collection of learnings and good practices when building GraphQL schemas at scale. Every language and every GraphQL implementation does things slightly differently. This book is completely language agnostic and instead focuses on concepts and patterns that are achievable no matter how you're building a GraphQL server. Think of it as a complete journey of what goes into building a GraphQL API, from design, to architectures, to implementation, and even documentation.

Want to build APIs like Facebook? Since Facebook's framework for building APIs, GraphQL, has become publicly available, this ambition seems to be within reach for many companies. And that is great. But first, let's learn what GraphQL really is and - maybe even more importantly - let's figure out how to apply GraphQL to build APIs that consumers love. Do you like to learn hands-on? In this book, we take a hands-on approach to learning GraphQL. We first explore the concepts of the two GraphQL languages using examples. Then we start writing some code for our first GraphQL API. We develop this API step by step, from creating a schema and resolving queries, over mocking data and connecting data sources all the way to developing mutations and setting up event subscriptions. Are your API consumers important to you? This book shows you how to apply a consumer-oriented design process for GraphQL APIs, so you can deliver what your consumers really want: an API that solves their problems and offers a great developer experience. Do you want to enable the API consumers so they can build great apps? This book explains the GraphQL query language, which allows the API consumers to retrieve data, write data and get notified when data changes. More importantly, you let them decide, which data they really need from the API. Do you want to make your API easy and intuitive to use? This book shows you how to use the GraphQL schema language to define a type system for your API, which serves as a reference documentation and helps your API consumers write queries that are syntactically correct. Do you want to profit from what has worked for others? This book provides a collection of best practices for GraphQL that have worked for other companies, e.g. regarding pagination, authentication and caching. REST vs. GraphQL: Which one is better? GraphQL and REST are competing philosophies for building APIs. It is not in the scope of this book to compare or discuss the two approaches. The focus of this book is on a hands-on approach for learning GraphQL.

If you want to learn how to build efficient user interfaces with React, this is your book. Authors Alex Banks and Eve Porcello show you how to create UIs with this small JavaScript library that can deftly display data changes on large-scale, data-driven websites without page reloads. Along the way, you’ll learn how to work with functional programming and the latest ECMAScript features. Developed by Facebook, and used by companies including Netflix, Walmart, and The New York Times for large parts of their web interfaces, React is quickly growing in use. By learning how to build React components with this hands-on guide, you’ll fully understand how useful React can be in your organization. Learn key functional programming concepts with JavaScript Peek under the hood to understand how React runs in the browser Create application presentation layers by mounting and composing React components Use component trees to manage data and reduce the time you spend debugging applications Explore React’s component lifecycle and use it to load data and improve UI performance Use a routing solution for browser history, bookmarks, and other features of single-page applications Learn how to structure React applications with servers in mind