Summary

The goal of this chapter was to briefly introduce you to the concepts of GraphQL and Apollo Client prior to the final chapter of this book, where you're going to implement some Apollo Client and GraphQL code.

Apollo Client is yet another approach to the state management problem in React applications. It's different in the sense that it reduces the complexities associated with the data fetching code that we must write with other approaches such as Context.

The two key aspects of Apollo Client are declarative data fetching and explicit mutation side-effect handling. All of this is expressed through the GraphQL syntax and React Hooks. In order to have an Apollo Client application, you need a GraphQL backend from which the data can be retrieved.

Now, let's move on to the final chapter, where you'll examine GraphQL concepts in more detail by creating a React application with Apollo Client.