In my recent research I came across the term MEAN web development. Ok, nice name; now I’m interested. Reading on, I found that MEAN is an acronym for a tool set used to do rapid, economical web development.
Data is persisted using Mongo db. Since Mongo is available as open systems software you can deploy it for little or no cost, depending on the host operating system, and hardware requirements.
The Express framework is used for the web software to communicate with Mongo DB. This provides a lot of the scaffolding for you, so you can focus on the data you wish to persist, rather than the mechanics to make it happen.
Angular is used as a javascript enabled framework to handle your web application logic. It works well in an MVC type situation, providing controller logic to interact with your views and view models.
Finally, in an effort to remain generic, Node.js is selected to host the web services for your application. Again, this keeps you in a software stack that is less machine/os specific. Node.js, being a framework written in java script, runs on different host systems.
With this simple stack you can create some pretty powerful web sites. If nothing else, it makes a great prototype tool. However, the tools are robust enough, and are capable of scaling out. I feel a need to try out a new application using MEAN. How about you?
Cheers,
Ben