Blogging Roller

The BlogQL server uses Apollo Server to provide a GraphQL API. Initially, I was using Apollo Server standalone, but when I stared integrating Google Login I realized I needed a couple of REST APIs so I added Express https://expressjs.com for that. On the frontend, I'm using React Oauth2 which makes adding Google Login support very easy to implement.  This all works fine, but if I were to start over I might consider using a server-side framework like Next.js https://nextjs.org instead of rolling my own Apollo Server and Express setup. 

This is part of a series of short posts about BlogQL:  https://github.com/snoopdave/blogql.

When I first started with BlogQL, I used create-react-app (CRA) to generate the code. It worked well and allowed me to focus on learning React, but eventually I found it too constraining. I wanted to learn the underlying technologies of WebPack and Babel and CRA tucks those away. It took some time, but was able to remove CRA and replace it with my own WebPack and Babel setup.

If I had to start again, I might consider using Vite, which is growing in popularity as an alternative to WebPack.

This is part of a series of short posts about BlogQL:  https://github.com/snoopdave/blogql.

Last summer, I started a side project to enhance my knowledge of Node, TypeScript, React, GitHub Actions and to dog-food Apollo GraphQL Studio's features that I was working on. In the past couple of months, I've continued to work on BlogQL and now that the UI is not a total embarrassment, I'm going to share a little about the project.

BlogQL is a blog app made up of a TypeScript/Node backend that provides a GraphQL API and a TypeScript/React-based frontend with a rich-text editor for editing blog entries. Below is a two-minute demo so you can see the features that BlogQL supports. You can find the complete source for BlogQL on GitHub https://github.com/snoopdave/blogql.