Chapter 1: App Architecture and Development Environment

Throughout this book, we'll develop a full stack web application with an Angular frontend, a Node.js backend, and a MySQL database.

As a consequence, in this first chapter, we'll learn about the project's structure and the tools required to develop the application. After that, we'll have our machine ready for development. Specifically, we'll install Node.js alongside npm and MySQL.

Node.js is required for the backend application, which runs a server that exposes a GraphQL API using Express.js, one of the most popular Node frameworks. Node.js is also necessary for development of the frontend application. This is because Angular uses an official command-line interface to initialize the project and scaffold any required artifacts during the application's development.

MySQL will be utilized to store our data but it will not be directly accessible in our code. Rather than that, we will be using an ORM called TypeORM.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• The project's architecture and development technologies
• Installing MySQL
• Installing and configuring Node.js