Lab implementation following the MEAN stack tutorial on thinkster. My goal was to compare this to my previous experiences with LAMP-like stacks like Ruby on Rails and Django.
Check out this blog post for a basic comparison of LAMP vs MEAN.
I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 so here is what I did.
The Ubuntu Trusty repo contains an older version and the latest MongoDB release (2.6) has some enhancements that you really want, particulary concerning safe writes.
Again, Ubuntu Trusty repo contains an older version of Node.js and I want the latest stable version. I also think it's pratical to separate versions of frameworks/languages and their dependencies for different projects. After install I stored the version in a nvmrc file. Run nvm use in the project folder to make sure you are using the correct version.
I thought the tutorial was pretty straight forward with helpful links on subjects you may want to read up on. I have good previous knowledge of MongoDB and web development in general and I have worked with other Javascript front end frameworks before. I've never worked with AngularJS or Express before, so that was new to me.
One thing that bothered me is that the tutorial did not include how to write tests for your implementation. I would like to have seen at least one unit test of the api code and some form of integration test of the full implementation. Thinkster tackles the issue of testing in their course A Better Way to Learn AngularJS. Jasmine and Karma seems to be the preferred tools for testing AngularJS.
I feel I got a good basic understanding on how to create a web application using the MEAN stack and what the benefits are. Regarding drawbacks - not so much. It seems to me that when you need to get a web site up and going fast and easy, using MEAN is a viable option to the more common choice of Ruby on Rails. In fact I liked the architechture of MEAN better than Rails.
Using the MEAN stack your back end produces a REST api and is not as tightly coupled with the data model as with a standard Rails application. So if your back end isn't performing as you hoped, you can easily switch it to another implementation.
While exploring the subject of MEAN i found MEAN.IO. It seemed to be some sort of Rails-y set of tools with scaffolding, package management etc to get you started with the MEAN stack, so I decided to check it out after finishing the above mentioned tutorial.
You can use MEAN.IO either with Grunt or Gulp. I choose Grunt since that seems to be the recommendation from MEAN.IO.
npm install -g grunt-cli
npm install -g bower
npm install -g mean-cli
Scaffolding with MEAN.IO framework is really a wrapper around cloning the MEAN.IO git repo (https://github.com/linnovate/mean) with some additional steps. A word of warning: You might want to clean up readme files, git repo configuration and other stuff before committing your new project to your repo. I did not, and got dirty submodule warnings from git when committing.
mean init flipper-news
? What would you name your mean app? flipper-news
? Do you prefer grunt or gulp as a taskrunner? grunt
? Which mean packages would you like to install? mean-admin
cd flipper-news && npm install
Then just start the server with grunt and go to http://localhost:3000. Voilà! You're up and running!
I opted in for the mean-admin package hoping it would provide a simple database web interface like RailsAdmin or Django admin. The admin package does provide a database interface. It also provides a web ui for managing users, system settings, themes and modules.
Start by creating a user by clicking on the "Join" link in the web ui. Make your user an admin by running mean user <your email> -a admin and restarting server. Log in and now you have access to the admin features.
The scaffolding done by calling mean init <app> also creates an example package articles as a starting point for a blog or similiar application.
I'm not going to dig any deeper into the MEAN.IO framework, but it seems kind of nice if you don't mind the overhead produced by the somewhat clumbsy scaffolding. You get user authentication and some other stuff to get you started with a new project quickly.
Personally, I don't like cluttering my projects with stuff that's not beeing used and would therefore not use MEAN.IO scaffolding to initialize a project. I would however gladly follow the MEAN.IO guidelines on how to structure a MEAN stack project.