William Lyon - Full Stack GraphQL Applications: With React, Node.js, and Neo4j

Thank you for reading Full Stack GraphQL Applications. The goal of this book is to demonstrate how GraphQL, React, Apollo, and Neo4j Database (the so-called GRANDstack) can be used together to build complex, data-intensive full stack applications. You may be wondering why weve chosen this specific combination of technologies. As you read through the book, I hope you will realize the developer productivity, performance, and intuitive benefits of using a graph data model throughout the stackfrom the database to the APIand all the way through the frontend client data-fetching code.

This is the book that I wished existed when I was the first engineering hire at a small startup, tasked with building out our full stack web application. We spent months evaluating technologies for our stack and exploring how they fit together. Eventually, we figured it out and got to production with a combination of technologies we were happy with, but getting there required many iterations.

GraphQL is a technology that has fundamentally changed how developers approach web development over the last few years. This book is focused on GraphQL; however, understanding how to build GraphQL servers and write GraphQL operations is not enough to put a full stack application into production. We need to consider how to enable GraphQL data fetching and state management in our frontend application, how to secure our API, how to deploy our application, and myriad other considerations. Thats why this book isnt about just GraphQL; instead, we explore using GraphQL holistically by showing how the pieces fit together. If you find yourself tasked with building a full stack application using GraphQL, then this book is for you!

Writing a book is a long process that involves the help and support of many others. Its impossible to acknowledge everyone who helped this book come to fruition without missing some folks. Of course, this book wouldnt be possible without everyone involved in creating the amazing technologies we cover.

Thanks to Michael Stephens for approaching me with the idea of writing a book about GraphQL and helping to ideate on the idea of full stack GraphQL, to Karen Miller for all the great feedback on early versions of every chapter, and all the folks at Manning who were involved: Doug, Aleksandar, Andy, Christian, Melody, Niek, Gordan, and Marija. Thanks to my family for putting up with me while working on this book. Special thanks goes out to the graph community for helping to validate the ideas in this book as well as providing great feedback and contributions to the Neo4j GraphQL library as it has evolved.

To all the reviewers: Andres Sacco, Brandon Friar, Christopher Haupt, Damian Esteban, Danilo Zekovic, Deniz Vehbi, Ferit Topcu, Frans Oilinki, Gustavo Gomes, Harsh Raval, Ivo Snchez Checa Crosato, Jose Antonio Hernandez Orozco, Jose San Leandro, Kevin Ready, Konstantinos Leimonis, Krzysztof Kamyczek, Michele Adduci, Miguel Isidoro, Richard Meinsen, Richard Vaughan, Rob Lacey, Ronald Borman, Ryan Huber, Satej Kumar Sahu, Simeon Leyzerzon, Stefan Turalski, Tanya Wilke, Theofanis Despoudis, and Vladimir Pasman, your suggestions helped make this a better book.

The goal of Full Stack GraphQL Applications is to show how the pieces of a full stack GraphQL application fit together and how full stack developers can leverage online services to enable development and deployment. This is done by introducing concepts and building upon each chapter as we build and deploy a full stack business review application.

This book is intended for full stack web developers interested in GraphQL who have at least a basic level of understanding of Node.js API applications and client JavaScript applications that connect to these APIs. The successful reader will have some basic familiarity with Node.js and a basic understanding of client-side JavaScript but, most importantly, they will have a motivation for understanding how to build GraphQL services and applications leveraging GraphQL.

This book is composed of nine chapters, divided into three parts. Each chapter introduces new concepts and technologies in the context of building a full stack business review application.

In part 1, we introduce GraphQL, the Neo4j graph database, and the concept of thinking in graphs:

• Chapter 1 discusses the components of a full stack GraphQL application, including an introduction to each specific technology well be using in the book (GraphQL, React, Apollo, and Neo4j Database).