MEAN Stack Definition and Advantages
What is the MEAN Stack?
The MEAN stack is a popular stack of technologies used to create web applications. However, you should be aware of the fact that many of these technologies are interchangeable. For example, you could use Backbone, Ember, or React on the frontend instead of Angular. You could use Hapi instead of Express, and MySQL of Postgres instead of Mongo. Each of these technologies has certain advantages and drawbacks.
MEAN is an acronym for the four main technologies that it is comprised of:
- MongoDB : It is the no SQL database . It uses JSON style documents for the data representation. The reason of choosing Mongo is that, it lets you make the use of just one language the whole way through. Well, whether you should select the tool as per your requirement. At the end of the day, it is your choice.
- ExpressJS : It is a HTTP server framework for web applications that gives useful modules and components to work upon the common task for the website. 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 supporting Connect middleware to plug in synchronous functions in order to manage the requests and responses.
- AngularJS : It is a frontend JS framework to develop complex client side applications with modular code and data binding UI. It is used to develop the single page applications with the use of the MVC architecture; and maintained by Google. It improves the structure of the code and makes the testing easier with the dependency injection.
- Node.js : It is a concurrent JavaScript environment for building scalable and fast web applications. It compiles the JavaScript code to native machine code before the execution. It is lightweight and perfect for the real time applications.
What are the advantages of using the MEAN stack?
- One of the most important benefits of all is that, it lets the developer write the entire code in JavaScript; from client to server. This is like a blessing for the JavaScript developers who have invested their time and money in learning JavaScript for the client side tasks.
- It supports the MVC (Model View Controller) architecture.
- The MEAN components are open source; which means the stack gets updated regularly. In addition to it, it is easy and flexible to understand and use which helps the developers to customize as per your needs.
- Other advantages are the huge module library of node.js and the use of JSON i to transfer the data.