MEAN is an acronym for MongoDB, Express, Angular and Node. This will be the stack we'll be using a lot in the near future. This document is meant to collect resources used in MEAN applications. Note that occasionally, other frameworks insert themselves into the basic MEAN stack, calling them selves MEARN or MERN (by adding React and still possibly including Angular).
MongoDB is a NoSQL database based on key-value store which is usually best for data that doesn't necessarily conform to rows and columns. The name comes from the middle of the word "Humongous. It's an open-source cross-platform document oriented database program. Around since 2007, the first release was in 2009.
You can use Mongodb by itself (it has a command line provided by the
mongo command) or with an ORM resource on top of MongoDB. For Node
applications, we generally use the Mongoose Object Relational Mapper
(ORM).
Express is a web application framework based on Node.js. It is a minimal server inspired by Sinatra and is commonly used as the backend of the MEAN stack together with MongoDB. Many more features are available as plug-ins.
Angular refers to the 2.x version of Angular opposed to AngularJS which usually refers to the 1.x version. The latest version is 5.x.
Node.js is an open-source Javascript run-time environment for executing server-side Javascript code. Initial release was 2009.
GraphQL is a query language for APIs used to provide a description of the data in an API. That is, GraphQL allows an API provider to lay out all of the types of questions that the API can answer.
Webpack is a module bundler. It takes modules and dependencies and generates static assets that represent those modules. It also can generate a dependency graph to help developers create more modular web application designs.
Gulp is an open-source JavaScript toolkit created by Fractal Innovations and the community at GitHub. It is used as a streaming build system and task runner for fron-end web development. It uses a code-over-configuration approach to define tasks. It has over 300 plug-ins to choose rom to build tools.
Gulp can be used to serve the sites generated with the help of Yeoman.
Babel JS is a transpiler for Javascript. It can take the latest version of JavaScript, Typescript or EC6 and produce code for older browsers.
Redux is a predictable state container for Javascript apps. [Note that Redux-framework is also the name of a Wordpress framework; that framework is at https://reduxframework.com.] Redux can be used with React or with any other view library. It's 2k size including dependencies helps with this. Note that React and Redux are not part of the MEAN stack, but are sometimes roped in (calling it Mern or something else).
Yarn is a package manager. It manages packages and dependencies. Technially, Yarn is a superset of NPM that solves many of the problems with NPM. Yarn has its own lock file (yarn.lock) that takes the place of package-lock.json that npm 5 uses. However, some testing shows that yarn is still faster than NPM for some of the same tasks. From a Rails perspective, the version 5.1 of Rails has replaced the Rails Asset Pipeline with Webpack and Yarn.
Mocha is a Javascript test framework that runs under Node.js.It's initial release was November 2011.
Loads a SASS / SCSS file and compile it to CSS. Use the css-loader or the raw-loader to turn it into a JS module and the ExtractTextPlugin to turn it into a separate file.
Bootstrap-sass is a sass-powered version of Bootstrap 3, ready to drop right into your sass powered applications.
Node-sass is a library that provides bindings for Node.js to LibSass, which is the C version of the stylesheet preprocessor, Sass.
Neat is a lightweight and flexible Sass grid. It will work with Bower,
Ruby or NPM. There is also a neat-cli tool to install Neat into the
current directory.
A lightweight Sass Toolset. Bourbon is a library of Sass mixins and functions to make you a more efficient stylesheet author.
This is a simple templating method that lets you generate HTML code from JS templates.
HTML Abstraction Markup Language. Another templating tool to generate HTML from formatted files that look approximately like YAML files.
Passport is authentication middleware for Node. Passport delegates all other functionality to the application besides authentication requests.
Jade is a node templating engine. It uses input similar to Haml, in the sense that they are both indented and that the indentation shows the level of nesting in the generated HTML code. Note that Jade has more features to handle inline JS code than HAML. It looks like Jade is the same as Pug; not sure about this, though.
Flow is a static typechecker for Javascript. Using it involves adding some types to JS code so that Flow can recognize usage patterns and check the code. The types are stripped when the code is transpiled by Babel. The transpiling process happens anyway during final asset creation when JS code is minified. Using Babel allows us to use the latest JS coding techniques knowing that the code will be transpiled in such a way as to make backward compatible all of the newer features for older browsers.