In this chapter, we spent a fair amount of time exploring our options for making, simulating, and running a backend server alongside our Create React App project. This allows us to pass projects off to other teams where they know the implicit data structure contracts that need to exist as part of the development process between frontend and backend development teams.

We also spent a good chunk of time exploring our options for retrieving data from inside a React project out to a server! This is only one possible option for implementation out of many; in general, Javascript projects tend to have a ton of different (and all equally good in their own rights) ways to implement a lot of common functionality. Using Fetch and a service library is just one possible way to do this, but it's a way that I've personally found a lot of success with and tend to stick with, unless I see a need to do something more complicated.

In the next chapter, we'll explore some of the more progressive options for supporting a web application in a way that supports both mobile users and users with poor internet connections: progressive web apps! Create React App ships with really great support for building progressive web applications right out of the gate, so we'll take a deep dive into building a progressive web app, what functionality and opportunities that affords us, and how we can take advantage of that to make a truly modern React application, all while remaining inside the confines of our Create React App project!