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

The rapid pace of change in the JavaScript ecosystem has fueled the evolution of backend services to embrace service-oriented architecture (SOA) as the means of providing resources for client web applications. These backend services commonly rely on Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs as the primary means of communication with a front-end application.

The use of JSON to communicate via REST APIs is one that also unlocks a new layer of compatibility for a full stack JavaScript web application, such as the MEAN stack. Without a need to serialize and deserialize between different object representations, manipulating and working with API requests and responses can be done using pure JavaScript. Express, in its minimalist spirit, doesn't offer us a default approach for how to implement a REST API. However, it has all the parts we will need to easily build...