MEAN Stack: Introduction (Part 1)

This article was first published on the Knoldus blog. 

MEAN Stands for

M — Mongo DB (database system)

E — Express (back-end framework)

A — Angular.js (front-end framework)

N — Node.js (back-end runtime environment)

What Is MEAN?

MEAN is a full-stack JavaScript solution that helps you build fast, robust, and maintainable production web applications. The stack used in mean is:

1. Mongo DB: Mongo DB is an open-source document database designed for ease of development and scaling. It is the world’s leading NoSQL database that stores its data into a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format. When compared to relational databases, NoSQL databases are more scalable and provide superior performance, and their data model addresses several issues that the relational model is not designed to address:
   • Large volumes of rapidly changing structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
   • Agile sprints, quick schema iteration, and frequent code push.
   • Object-oriented programming that is easy to use and flexible.
   • Geographically distributed scale-out architecture instead of expensive, monolithic architecture.
2. Express: Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications. It provides a thin layer of fundamental web application features, without obscuring Node.js features. It gives you the simple interface so that you can make request endpoints and cookie handling. Apart from that, it is good at enabling the simple REST routes, handling automated HTTP header and connect middleware to plug-in synchronous functions in order to manage the requests and responses
3. Angular: Angular is a front-end web application framework mainly maintained by Google. It is a platform that makes it easy to build applications with the web. It lets you extend HTML vocabulary for your application as HTML is great for declaring static documents, but it falters when we try to use it for declaring dynamic views in web-applications. It is one framework for both mobile and desktop. Currently, Angular version 6 is going on. In Angular 6, the code is written in TypeScript, which compiles to JavaScript and displays the same in the browser.
4. Node: Node is a javascript run-time environment that executes javascript code outside of a browser. It is designed to build scalable network applications. It uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Why MEAN?

• Supports MVC (Model View Controller) architecture
• Allow to start with complete frontend development initially
• 100% Open source
• Large Community Support
• Uniform language usage throughout the stack
• Exemplary for real-time web applications

I hope this article helps you to understand more about MEAN and the technology stack used. If you want to explore more, visit here.

This article was first published on the Knoldus blog.