Learning GraphQL

Chapter 7. GraphQL in the Real World

So far, you have designed a schema, constructed a GraphQL API, and implemented a client using Apollo Client. We’ve taken one complete full-stack iteration with GraphQL and developed an understanding of how GraphQL APIs are consumed by clients. Now it’s time to prepare our GraphQL APIs and clients for production.

To take your new skills into production, you are going to need to meet the requirements of your current applications. Our current applications likely allow for file transfer between the client and the server. Our current applications might use WebSockets to push real-time data updates to our clients. Our current APIs are secure and protect against malicious clients. To work with GraphQL in production, we need to be able to meet these requirements.

Also we need to think about our development teams. You might be working with a full-stack team, but more often than not, teams are split into frontend developers and backend developers. How can all of your developers work efficiently from different specializations within our GraphQL stack?

And what about the sheer scope of your current code base? At present, you likely have many different services and APIs running in production and probably have neither the time nor the resources to rebuild everything from the ground up with GraphQL.

In this chapter, we address all of these requirements and concerns. We begin by taking two more iterations in the PhotoShare API. First, we incorporate subscriptions ...