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 asynchronous nature of JavaScript has made testing a challenge for many application developers. However, the basic principles of why you should test software remain the same. Testing your code helps prevent unintended mistakes stemming from changes you introduce to your code. By providing test coverage to your application, it is much easier to feel confident that changes in features or functionalities won't result in undermining the existing applications' behavior.

As with most applications, testing for a MEAN stack web application can generally be thought of as a pyramid of three different levels of test abstraction: Unit tests, Integration tests, and E2E tests:

While there are many schools of thought when it comes to testing strategy, we will stick to some of the most common types of testing you may want to do in a MEAN stack web application. We&apos...