Building Modern Web Apps with MEAN Stack

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Building Modern Web Apps with MEANStack
By Suresh Patidar
E

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Who am I?
{
"name":"Suresh Patidar",
"before":"Worked with ClearTrail Technologies and L&T",
"today":"UI Architect @ Calsoft",
"Geek":[
"Writes code for Frontend and Backend",
"Works on UI/UX aspect",
"Create Application Architecture and Design"
],
"languages-and-frameworks":[
"JavaScript, NodeJS, AngularJS, Backbone, JQuery…",
"HTML, CSS, SASS, LESS, Bootstrap etc.",
"Java, .NET (C#), Spring MVC",
"Oracle, MySql, MongoDB"
],
"specialized-in":[
"Application Architecture & Design",
"MEAN Stack/Full Stack Application Development",
"Web development/Architecture",
"Mobile Development"
]
}

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Agenda
 Structure of web application
 The requirements for a Modern Web App
 What is MEAN stack?
 Who uses MEAN stack?
 How it is different from LAMP stack?
 The MEAN Stack Architecture and
Components
 So why Go MEAN?
 Value of the MEAN stack
 MEAN Security
 What’s bad about MEAN approach?
 Future of MEAN stack
 Any Questions?

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Structure of Web Application

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Requirements for a modern web app
 Customers want fast web sites/fast response time
 No page reloads
 Enterprises want to go virtual
• One box + Several Virtual Images = Shared Hardware
• Systems with minimal memory footprint/overhead needed
 As many concurrent requests as possible
 Only load resources when needed (conditional loading)
 Most of the data must come from a slim REST-API
 Mobile friendly/Responsive UIs
 Automated build for backend AND frontend
• Including check for coding conventions, testing,…
• Integration in company’s continuous integration platform

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Front end vs. Back end
Introduction to the
MEAN Stack

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What is MEAN stack?
“MEAN is a fullstack JavaScript platform for modern web applications”
– Mean.io

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Who uses MEAN stack?
and many more…

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How it is different from LAMP stack?
 Building web application with a LAMP approach
• Server-side language: PHP, Perl, JSP, ASP…
• Server-side container: Tomcat, Jboss, Jetty, Apache,…
• Server-side templating: HAML, Moustache,…
• Server-side MVC framework: Spring, Struts,…
• Client-side JavaScript: jQuery, AngularJS, BackboneJS
• > 5 different technologies/languages
 Building web applications with a MEAN approach
• JavaScript and JSON
• That’s it!

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AngularJS
Our app’s entire frontend
 Open source, maintained by Google
 Client Side MVC (MVVM) framework
 Excellent data bindings
 Very modular and extensible
 Great browser support (> IE8)
 Well documented
 Easy to test

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Node.js
Lightweight web server framework
 Released in 2009 by Ryan Dahi
 Written in C/C++
 Built on Google Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine
 Extremely lightweight and efficient
 What JavaScript has done for the web browser,
Node.js is doing for backend server
 Does module loading and Asynchronous IO
 Single threaded, One node process per CPU
 Easily scalable (just create a cluster)
 Great community and well maintained

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Express
Create our routes and our API
 A simple, minimal, robust and flexible web
application framework for Node.js
 Gives everything we would expect to build a
modern web server
 Abstracts away a lot of low level logic (e.g. for
HTTP requests, SSL etc.)
 Helps organize your Node app into an MVC
structure
 Easy to implement REST API and session
management
 Middleware, routing, templating, static-files,
cookies, mime-types and much much more

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MongoDB
Our data store
 A simple and scalable document based top
NoSQL Database
 Open Source, maintained by MongoDB
 JSON like syntax and model persistence
 Key-value stores
 Replication and High-Availability
 Flexible Schemas, Full Index support, Query
Selectors, Sharding and much much more

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MEAN Stack Language and Format Usage

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Advantages of MEAN Stack over conventional
Technology Stack

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MEAN Stack (Full Stack) Development Team

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So why Go MEAN?
 It is 100% free, Open Source and Web Standards
 JavaScript all the way down
 Consistent models across stack (backend to frontend and
back)
 Consistent best practices across stack
 Use a uniform language throughout your stack
• JavaScript (the language of the web)
• JSON (the data format of the web)
• No conversion needed for the database
 Very low memory footprint/overhead
 Leverage JavaScript’s popularity
 Huge community

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Value of MEAN stack
 Universal end-to-end workflow
 Focus on speed of development
 Flexible pieces

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MEAN Security
 It’s as insecure as you code it 
 It’s JavaScript so you have to be careful
• Always use “strict” mode
• Always declare variables
• Always throw all errors
• Always handle all callbacks (e.g. Success AND Error)
• Use patterns for visibility (e.g. Module pattern)
• Do static code analysis (JSHint/JSLint)
• Always encode untrusted data
 Use Angular sanitizer ($sanitize) to sanitize an HTML string by
stripping all potentially dangerous tokens
 And of course – never run any application as root! 
 Test, Test and Test

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What’s bad about this “MEAN” approach
 For those who don’t like JavaScript – Its going to be killing you 
 There is still no general JS coding guidelines
 SPA need a new way of thinking
• The browser is your platform
 MongoDB is not as robust as an SQL Server is
• This security is what they sacrifice to gain speed
 We need to take care of rollbacks our self (2-Phase-Commit)
• ACID -> Possible but part of the driver/client application
 It’s hard to find specialists that are no hipsters
• Have the big picture/architecture for enterprise in mind
 It make sense to also have a look at Grunt, Yeoman and Bower in
order to create good developer experience
 Once you have created the first application with this technology,
it’s hard to go back to the old approach

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Future of MEAN Stack
Checkout http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016 for latest survey results

Building Modern Web Apps with MEAN Stack

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