What is MEAN Stack
MEAN stands for MongoDB, ExpressJS, Angular, and Node. MEAN is Web development stack for building full stack Web applications. That means, you can build a complete Web application including the frontend, the backend, and business logic with a database using the MEAN stack.
MEAN comprises four technologies, MongoDB, ExpressJS, Angular, and Node. The following diagram explains the role of each technology in the MEAN stack.
Angular
Angular is an open-source, JavaScript-based client-side framework that helps us to develop a web-based application. Angular is one of the best and most popular frameworks for developing any Single Page Application or SPA Applications.
The main benefits of using Angular:
- Angular modifies the page DOM directly instead of adding inner HTML code which is faster.
- Data binding does not occur on each control or value change (no change listeners) but at particular points of the JavaScript code execution. That dramatically improves performance, as a single bulk Model/View update replaces hundreds of cascading data change events.
- There is no need to use observable functions. Angular analyzes the page DOM and builds the bindings based on the Angular-specific element attributes. That requires less writing, meaning the code is cleaner, easier to understand, and has fewer errors.
- Extended features such as dependency injection, routing, animations, view encapsulation, and more are available.
- It is supported by IntelliJ IDEA and Visual Studio .NET IDEs.
- It is supported by Google and a great development community.
- Angular is a comprehensive solution for rapid front-end development. It does not need any other plugins or frameworks.
- Angular is unit testing ready, and that is one of its most compelling advantages.
ExpressJS
ExpressJS is the middleware and sits between Angular and Node as a part of the MEAN stack. ExpressJS is a NodeJS framework for creating server-side applications. ExpressJS provides many shorthand methods for writing the functionality provided by NodeJS.
NodeJS
Node or Node.js is an open source, cross platform JavaScript based server-side runtime framework. Unlike JavaScript, Node runs on server. Node has recently become one of the more popular frameworks to build Web applications based on JavaScript.
MongoDB
MongoDB is a document-based open-source database. MongoDB is a leading NoSQL database. It provides high performance, high availability, auto sharding and automatic scaling. MongoDB database is written mainly in C++ . Its drivers and client libraries are typically written in their respective languages, although some drivers use C extensions for better performance. MongoDB differs from relational databases because it is a schema-less database. Such databases usually have lower transaction safety but are faster in accessing data and scale better than relational databases.
MongoDB stores data as documents. So it is a document-based database. A document is a data structure that stores the data in field and value pairs. The format of MongoDB documents are similar to JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). The values of a field may include a simple value, array and other documents. MongoDB uses BSON format to store the data into a document.
Learn MEAN
Here are detailed tutorials and learning material on MEAN stack.