Introducing MEAN

MEAN is an abbreviation for MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, and Node.js. The concept behind it is to use only JavaScript - driven solutions to cover the different parts of your application. The advantages are great and are as follows:

• A single language is used throughout the application
• All the parts of the application can support and often enforce the use of the MVC architecture
• Serialization and deserialization of data structures is no longer needed because data marshaling is done using JSON objects

However, there are still a few important questions that remain unanswered:

• How do you connect all the components together?
• Node.js has a huge ecosystem of modules, so which modules should you use?
• JavaScript is paradigm agnostic, so how can you maintain the MVC application structure?
• JSON is a schema-less data structure, so how and when should you model your data?
• How do you handle user authentication?
• How should you use the Node.js non-blocking architecture to support real-time interactions?
• How can you test your MEAN application code base?
• What kind of JavaScript development tools can you use to expedite your MEAN application development process?

In this book, I'll try to answer these questions and many more, but before we can go any further, you will first need to install the basic prerequisites.