MEAN Stack Apps Explained for Java Developers

This article presents a brief description of What a MEAN Stack Web/Mobile Application is.  Coming from Java background, I thought it best to present an analogy for Java developers to get a quick understanding of MEAN Web/Mobile Application development. Please feel free to comment/suggest if I missed to mention one or more important points. Also, sorry for the typos.

Following are the key points described later in this article:

• What is a MEAN Web/Mobile Application?
• A Web Application Stack in General
• Sample Web Application using JEE (Spring/Hibernate) Framework
• A MEAN Stack Web/Mobile Application

What is a MEAN Web/Mobile Application?

A MEAN Stack based web/mobile application makes use of following technologies:

• M: MongoDB
• E: ExpressJS
• A: AngularJS
• N: NodeJS

You may note that we are not required to use middleware technologies such as JEE or .NET to process user request/response. It is all about Javascript. In following text, I shall briefly explain the skeleton of any Web application with examples and show analogy with MEAN Stack.

A Web Application Stack in General

A web application framework is required to fulfil some of the following key objectives:

• One or more user interfaces for end users to interact
• One or more web servers to handle user request/response
• A Web framework to process user request/response
• One or more databases to store the data

Following are key components of any web application framework in general:

• UI
• Web Server
• Web application framework
• Database

Sample Web Application Using JEE (Spring/Hibernate) Framework

In Java web application, following are key components and related technologies:

• UI: This is taken care using HTML/CSS with JSP embedded tags to render dynamic data.
• Web/Application Server: The web server handles user requests and sends back the response after being processed using one or more services/components. Example of such app server is Tomcat server.
• Web Framework: There is a web framework to process the user requests/response. This is where a framework such as Spring, Struts and other popular Java web frameworks fit in.
• Database: There are different databases that one could use. For example, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server etc.

Following diagram represents a JEE based web app.

Java Web App Framework

A MEAN Stack Web/Mobile Application

A MEAN Web/Mobile app looks like following:

• UI: This is taken care using AngularJS.
• Web Server: This is based on NodeJS.
• Web Framework: This is based on ExpressJS. Mongoose is used to connect to MongoDB database.
• Database: The database is MongoDB.

Following diagram represents MEAN Stack App:

MEAN App Framework