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

Persisting data in a web application usually means the involvement of a structured query language (SQL) database to handle the structure and relationships of data. This approach, for many applications, provides a common answer to the modeling of application data and their relationships to each other. However, the nature of data in SQL databases is one of highly-structured schemas with clearly defined field types. In contrast to the flexible, semi-structured objects of JavaScript, this approach can sometimes make it burdensome to work with data structures between the web server and database.

The relationship of the data between the application and SQL databases is managed by serialization and deserialization between the database structures and the web server's model. The gap between what the data is when it's in the database and what it's transformed...