Book Image

MEAN Cookbook

By : Nicholas McClay
Book Image

MEAN Cookbook

By: Nicholas McClay

Overview of this book

The MEAN Stack is a framework for web application development using JavaScript-based technologies; MongoDB, Express, Angular, and Node.js. If you want to expand your understanding of using JavaScript to produce a fully functional standalone web application, including the web server, user interface, and database, then this book can help guide you through that transition. This book begins by configuring the frontend of the MEAN stack web application using the Angular JavaScript framework. We then implement common user interface enhancements before moving on to configuring the server layer of our MEAN stack web application using Express for our backend APIs. You will learn to configure the database layer of your MEAN stack web application using MongoDB and the Mongoose framework, including modeling relationships between documents. You will explore advanced topics such as optimizing your web application using WebPack as well as the use of automated testing with the Mocha and Chai frameworks. By the end of the book, you should have acquired a level of proficiency that allows you to confidently build a full production-ready and scalable MEAN stack application.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Creating integration tests for Express REST APIs

The next level of testing abstraction is integration tests. Unlike unit tests, which rely on only mocks to derive their behavior, integration tests usually introduce some level of real application integration with other services, connections, and dependencies. These tests can be highly important as they can be much more behaviorally realistic in their definition than unit tests. They are excellent for testing full behaviors of your application while still being very focused on individual parts. Testing functionalities such as our Express REST APIs and checking their expected results make for great integration tests.

Getting ready

Let's explore how to add some API integration...