How on Earth, it can be a good thing when someone is being MEAN? In Web developing world, being M.E.A.N can take a web application to a whole new level. Well it is an acronym of MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, Node.js. It is nothing but using AngularJS on client side and Node.js platform with Express framework on the server side and having MongoDB as the database. But what is so special about bring MEAN stack when there are tons of web technologies of building a web app, M.E.A.N is special in its own way of being flexible in terms of Scalable and providing good quality for the web app.

MongoDB: It is  a NoSQL document database, it is a non-structured database where documents will be stored in JSON (easily parsed), which will be internally represented in a BSON format to support extra datatypes like BinData type.

      Wait, what is BSON?  It is a Binary JSON, a binary serialization format used to store documents.

      Why BSON? It is helpful in encoding and decoding the data in a better way.

Express: Express is a Node.js web application framework, which is known for its robustness for building web and mobile applications, data integrations and . There are many Node.js frameworks like hapi.js , koa.js, Mojito and many other frameworks but Express is widely chosen by many web application developers.

AngularJS: It’s been a blessing to all web developers since its release. It helps in avoiding writing thousands of lines of code and allows to write it in MVC (Model View Controller) . It has many features like data binding, dependency injection, directives, filters and many more. It is used as a front end (Client Side) in the MEAN stack. It makes AJAX calls to retrieve data from the API, as the data is in JSON format it is very easy to retrieve the data to the front end.

Node.js: It is used to build  server side web applications with scalability and cross-platfrom compatability.  Best part of Node.js is its support for Single Page Applications, it never waits for an API to retrieve a data which makes it that it will never buffer. It is on Server side of the application usually with Express framework.

Testing: We can run simple task runners like GRUNT or GULP to test by running the test scripts but it also many testing frameworks like Karma, Mocha are available for testing MEAN Stack.

Using MEAN is still a naive practice as it need some bold migration from a traditional practices of storing data and accessing it from the server but it is slowly getting into the big race, many big Organizations like Netflix, Paypal use MEAN stack.