Learn Apollo, Immutable and Mobx

Developing logic-rich applications is a key skill to have.

The TypeScript–React combination helps you unlock that skill, and it’s a great developer experience in terms of writing understandable and refactorable HTML. But the default state management for React has a long way to go to feel simple and maintainable — and that’s where MobX makes your life so much easier. MobX keeps things simple without using complicated setups like `provider` and `connect` that provide way too little value for all the mental overhead. 

In this course, you’ll see how to model your React application logic using simple JavaScript classes — and with the help of MobX, make those classes the beating heart of your React applications. You’ll learn:

- that you don't need advanced annotations and TypeScript features to use MobX
- how to easily refactor code through TypeScript
- how to use TypeScript to track the flow of state as properties change

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

Develop React Applications with Mobx and TypeScript

GraphQL is a fan favorite for good reason. It lets a client make specific, complex, and/or aggregate queries for data, and it’s user-friendly to boot.

If you’ve been meaning to learn GraphQL and start harnessing its powers, this is a great place to start.

This course is for GraphQL newbies with a basic understanding of React. It focuses on the client-side implementation of GraphQL usage using the Apollo client.

We’ll start with a guide on how to add the Apollo client to an existing project, then move on using the Query and Mutation components to fetch and manipulate data using a GraphQL API.

GraphQL Data in React with Apollo Client

MobX State Tree (MST) is a library that helps you organize your application states in a very structured manner. It allows you to create a component model, but for your data!

Course instructor Michel Weststrate—creator of Mobx—will teach you to model application state after your problem domain with MST. You will get hands-on practice and see how MST lets you solve problems with its out-of-the-box support for asynchronous actions, patches, snapshots, and middleware.

Over the 17 lessons, you’ll build a little bookshop application using React, MST, and create-react-app, while learning how to manage the lifecycle of your data by describing data models. 

Join Michel in one of the most popular courses on egghead!

Manage Application State with Mobx-state-tree

MobX is designed to enable building web applications with a complex data model in an intuitive and very performant manner. Using React and MobX is currently the simplest way to build component based web applications.

"Half the code, twice the fun" is how people describe MobX, or "So simple, I cannot believe it just works". 



Manage Complex State in React Apps with MobX

im·mu·ta·ble i(m)ˈmyo͞odəb(ə)l/ adjective - **unchanging over time or unable to be changed**.

Mutating data is the source of never ending headaches in software systems, and JavaScript code is no exception. Immutable data structures, pure functions, uni-directional data flow... you've probably been hearing these terms.

Immutable.js provides us the data structures and utilities that we need to start introducing this powerful concept of immutability into our applications.

Immutable.js provides many Persistent Immutable data structures including: List, Stack, Map, OrderedMap, Set, OrderedSet and Record.

immutable

Learn how to use Immutable.js

Since MST offers a runtime type system, it can create and compose types on the fly, making it possible to reuse logic in new and powerful ways.

In this lesson you will learn:
* That MST types are immutable and composed together behind the scenes
* How to compose types explicitly by using `types.compose`
* How to create dynamic, parameterized types by leveraging that MST types are first class javascript citizens

Create Dynamic Types and use Type Composition to Extract Common Functionality

Apollo provides a universal GraphQL API on top of your existing services, so you can build new application features fast without waiting on backend changes.

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To query a GraphQL API, all you need to do is send an HTTP request that includes the query operation in the body of the request. In this lesson, we will use the browser’s fetch method to request the total days skied from our GraphQL API.

Fetch Data from a GraphQL API

Apollo Server is a GraphQL server that listens for incoming HTTP requests on a single endpoint.  In this lesson, we will stand up a simple GraphQL service that handles a query for total days skied during a season.

Create a GraphQL API with Apollo Server 2.0

Created by the team at Prisma, graphql-request is a lightweight package that can be used to send queries to any GraphQL API. Sending a request with graphql-request uses less syntax than a fetch request. In this lesson, we will query the totalDays field using this helper package.

Query a GraphQL API with graphql-request

Apollo Client allows you to build performant, production-ready applications that consume data from GraphQL services. In this lesson, we will query the totalDays field using Apollo Client.

Send a GraphQL Query with Apollo Client

React Apollo is a component library that we can use to rapidly build GraphQL client applications with React. In this lesson, we get our React app ready by setting up the Apollo Provider and sending our query using the Query component.

Set Up a React GraphQL Client Application with react-apollo

The Query component is used to render the state of the network request along with the data that is returned from the GraphQL API. In this lesson, we will refactor our application to include an App component that displays the resulting count returned by the totalDays field.

Display Query Results using the Query Component 

Queries get data from GraphQL services. If we want to change data, we will use GraphQL mutations. In this lesson, we’ll look at how to design GraphQL mutations to increment or decrement the number of ski days on record.

Change Data with GraphQL Mutations

We can read data from and write data to the cache directly with Apollo Client. In this video, we’ll update the UI by interacting with the cache instead of sending an additional request to the GraphQL server.

Update the Apollo Local Cache with the readQuery and writeQuery Methods

Using the GraphQL Schema Definition Language, we can define types that reflect all of the objects available on our API. In this lesson, we will create a SkiDay type and return a list of SkiDay objects with an allDays query. We will also create an enum, which describes a restricted list of allowed values for a particular field.

Create a GraphQL Object Type and Query a List of Objects

The addDay mutation should add details about each ski day. In this lesson, we’ll capture argument values from the GraphQL mutation and use this to change the ski day array.

Add Data to an Array with a GraphQL Mutation

Resolvers are functions that return data for specific fields. In this lesson, we’ll take a look at how to throw errors within resolvers if the data passed as arguments is incorrect or insufficient.

Incorporate Custom Error Handling within GraphQL Resolvers

GraphQL has five built-in scalar types that can be returned from a field: Int, Float, Boolean, String, and ID. It is also possible to create and validate your own custom scalar if you want to return a single value or leaf instead of an object from a field. In this lesson, we’ll build a custom scalar type to handle parsing and serializing dates.

Define a Custom Scalar Type for a GraphQL API

If you want to be able to parse and serialize custom scalar types sent as arguments, you’ll add the parseValue and parseLiteral functions to the custom scalar constructor. In this video, we’ll take a closer look at these functions and how they can be used to transform data passed by the client.


Parsing GraphQL Mutation Arguments with Custom Scalars

When passing arguments to a GraphQL mutation, you can send them inline, or you can wrap them in an input type. In this lesson, we’ll create an input type for the addDay mutation which will allow us to pass an entire object as an argument.

Wrap GraphQL Mutation Arguments with a GraphQL Input Type

GraphQL mutations are used to change data and can be also used to delete data. In this lesson, we’ll make changes to the removeDay mutation to delete a day from the ski days array by id. Additionally, we’ll return a custom type when we send the mutation.

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