Nader Dabit - Full Stack Serverless: Modern Application Development with React, AWS, and GraphQL

The goal of this book is to introduce you to all of the pieces needed to build a real-world and scalable full stack application using React and serverless technologies. It gradually introduces features (like authentication, APIs, and databases) and some techniques to implement these features, both on the frontend and backend, by building out different applications in each chapter.

Each application you create will build upon knowledge learned in the previous chapter. In the last chapter, you will build out a sophisticated application utilizing many of the cloud services needed to build real-world applications in your job or startup. When you have finished working through this book, you should have the knowledge and understanding needed to apply what you have learned to build serverless applications on your own using React and AWS cloud technologies.

In this chapter, Ill describe serverless philosophy, the characteristics and benefits of serverless applications, and introduce you to AWS and AWS Amplify CLI.

In this chapter, we will get going using AWS Amplify to create and deploy a serverless function. Well create the function, then add the API and interact with it.

Here, well cover the basic process of creating a new full stack application from scratch by building a notes app. We will create a new React application, initialize a new Amplify project, add a GraphQL API, and then connect to and interact with the API from the client (React) application.

In this chapter, we will walk through the process of adding authentication to an application. We will start by creating a new React application and adding basic authentication using the withAuthenticator higher-order component (HOC) from the AWS Amplify React library. Well read the users metadata and create a profile screen that will allow the user to see their information.