Conceptual question: How do React Native, Apollo, Node, and GraphQL all work together?

0
votes

I'm new to GraphQL, Apollo, AWS S3, and Redux. I've read the tutorials for each and I'm familiar with React Native, Node, Heroku, and Mongo. I'm having trouble understanding the following:

  • how a "GraphQL Server" is hosted for a mobile device using React Native?
  • can I create the GraphQL server with Node and host it on AWS S3?
  • how to grab that data by using Apollo/GraphQL in my React Native code and store that data locally using Apollo/Redux?
  • do I have to use Graphcool as the endpoint from the start instead? All I'm trying to do is pulling data from my database when the app loads (not looking to stream it, so that I am able to use the data offline).

Where should I look to get a better understanding?

1
node.jsreact-nativegraphqlapolloaws-sdk-nodejs

1 Answers

1
votes

I have a couple comments for you in your exploration of new territory.

GraphQL is simply the query language the talks to your database. So you are free to run any type of api (on a server, serverless, etc.) that will use graphql to take in a graphql query/mutation and interact with your database.

GraphCool is a "production-ready backend" basically back-end as a service. So you wouldn't worry about running a server (as I believe they run most everything on serverless infrastructure) or managing where your DB is housed.

You can run an HTTP server on AWS EC2 or serverless using AWS Lambda. (Or the same flavor with Google or Azure). Whatever you decide to use to accept requests, your endpoint will accept graphql query strings and then do stuff with the db. AWS S3 is more of static storage. You can store files there to be retrieved, or scripts that can be pulled, but S3 probably isn't where you would want any server-like code to run.

Apollo would be a tool to use on your frontend for easily interacting with your graphql server. React-Apollo

Apollo/Redux may help you then manage the state throughout the app. You'll simply be loading the data into the app state on load then interacting with that state without needing to make any more external calls it sounds like.

Hopefully this was helpful.