The MEAN Stack: MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS and Node.js

I really don't understand this no-sql everywhere trend. Types and structure definitions ARE useful. There are times when you may find them cumbersome, but most of time they're not (especially when working in teams). The more i think about it, the more i think my ideal stack would be this :<p>Postrgesql with no-sql extensions ( for when you may need flexibility), typed python or typescript or dart( or any language with optionnal typing) on the server, and typescripted js lib on the frontend I'd call it the Optional Typing Stack ( but ots isn't nearly as good as "mean" i must say).

The real problem with this MEAN stack for any real project is maintainability in 5 years time. You can almost guarantee that within 2 years, this stack will be semi-unsupported in favor of a newer JS library, with all the current devs and support on this stack jumping ship to better versions.<p>That said, this is a very awesome stack to use for hackathons and short projects or prototypes.

<i>A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me for help with PostgreSQL. As someone who’s been blissfully SQL-­free for a year, I was quite curious to find out why he wasn’t just using MongoDB instead.</i><p>The lead in seriously harms the technical credibility of the rest of the entry.

The NNN Stack: NoJS (Python, Twisted, Cyclone), NoNoSQL (PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (Elasticsearch).

MEAN or how to be redundant in the elements of your stack (Express.js is already a Node.js framework) just so that the acronym were somewhat sexy.

Hi all,<p>Author of the post here. Thanks for the excellent discussion, this is a very interesting read. Let me make a few comments re: some of the more interesting points I've read.<p>1) I love Redis, but in my book, if you're already using MongoDB, its more of a tool for reducing latencies once you're looking to scale. If I'm just looking to prototype I'll probably use one or the other, but not both. I love the MEANR / MEANER acronym though, but I can't support the EJS decision, I'm all about Jade =)<p>2) AngularJS not good for hackathons? Sounds like a subject for another post. Granted it may be that I'm just extremely biased towards Angular, I was an intern with the Google team that developed it in '08 and I've been using it since v0.9.9. However, I find Angular's slick two-way data-binding to be completely indispensable for building a prototype. There are two primary reasons for this, first I find the paradigm of writing Javascript which explicitly references the DOM to be brittle, and second it makes life easier for my designer because he never has to worry about breaking the frontend Javascript.<p>3) I agree that Javascript is a rapidly developing language and many of the tools that I use may well be obsolete within a few years. However, I think that I benefit from using the tools that I believe are best in the meantime, and when better tools are released, then we'll change along with them.<p>Thanks again for the commentary, I really appreciate it. I'll be coming out with a few more posts in the near future, please be on the lookout =)

This is funny. After using Angularjs at the recent techcrunch disrupt ny hackathon, I was mulling over writing a post that said Angularjs is not good for hackathons! To be clear, I am a newbie and am very impressed with Angularjs. That said, debugging Angularjs for a newbie is a nightmare. It was very brittle in our experience. Likely, this is because both my hackathon colleague and myself had less than a week's experience with Angularjs. We found that it was easy to find simple examples online, going to an actual app was VERY non-trivial.

I recently built a HN clone (for a much smaller community) using exactly this. As a solo / moonlit act, staying in a single language had huge benefits for me.<p>But I don't see the point of using an ORM with MongoDB... not saying ORMs are bad, I just don't think they have much to offer when there is no SQL to abstract and when you're doing everything in JSON anyway (in this stack). If I'm missing something, happy to be enlightened.

Nice acronym, I use that stack + Redis. Need to find something else starting with E then I can brag about the MEANER stack.

The MongoDB/AngularJS combination is really good enough on its own that you can shove most Language+Toolkits in there and have something together real fast I have use the following and its worked great each time<p><pre><code> MongoDB + Flask + Angular + Python MongoDB + Play + Angular + Scala</code></pre>

You can bring even more value to the table in terms of interoperability if you have the mongo api implemented on the client. No more looking at a different set of docs (backbone/angular/spine/ember/etc...) to figure out how to query the cache on the client differently than you do on the server.<p>The meteor guys have implemented this logic in a package called minimongo: <a href="http://bit.ly/YmS3Y1" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/YmS3Y1</a>

I've been working with a similar stack lately: MongoDB, ExpressJS, Node and Backbone/Marionette (Sorry, no snappy acronym). I've found it to be remarkably productive and would recommend giving it a try. Also, it's a lot of fun! If you're using Backbone (and apparently everyone is), you would do well to layer some structure on it with a framework like Marionette or Chaplin.

Would be great if not for the CPS. I end up doing something similar except with Clojure instead of Node.js for my projects lately.