Preparing Your Development Environment

The application we are going to build in this book will be a simplified version of Facebook, called Graphbook.

When developing an application, being well-prepared is always a requirement. However, before starting, we need to put our stack together. In this chapter, we will explore whether or not our techniques work well with our development process, what we need before getting started, and which tools can help us when building software.

This chapter explains the architecture for our application by going through the core concepts, the complete process, and the preparation of a working React setup.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• Architecture and technology
• Thinking critically about how to architect a stack
• Building the React and GraphQL stack
• Installing and configuring Node.js
• Setting up a React development environment with webpack, Babel, and other requirements
• Debugging React applications using Chrome DevTools and React Developer Tools
• Using webpack-bundle-analyzer to check the bundle size