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)

Introduction

JavaScript's history in backend web server development can be traced all the way back to NetScape's (now Mozilla's) Rhino engine as early as 1997 as the first attempt to create a robust JavaScript-based web server implementation.

The potential of using the same programming language on both the server and client of an application has fueled many explorations into creating different isomorphic programming frameworks, but resulted in only limited success.

Now, 2 decades later, Node.js has brought forth a new wave of JavaScript-based backend frameworks. Finally, we have realized the one-language paradigm for web development with an all JavaScript application stack known as the MEAN Stack.

One Node.js framework called Connect introduced a modular, compositional style of web server development inspired by Ruby's Sinatra framework. This framework quickly...