Valeri Karpov

Prototype and adapt with the MEAN stack

Rapid web development with MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, and Node.js

Web development may seem like a bustling space where everything changes every 5 minutes, but, in reality, the fundamental high-level concepts of building a web application haven’t changed much since the introduction of Ajax. The libraries and concepts, like the MEAN stack, that people have built up around HTTP and browser-side JavaScript simply provide abstractions to help people build sophisticated browser-based tools more easily. However, the fundamental challenges of web development remain mostly unchanged, and the ultimate arbiter of the value of a web development framework is how easily it enables you to overcome these challenges. In this article, I’ll highlight what I believe to be the fundamental categories of web development problems, and how the MEAN stack, consisting of MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS, and Node.js, helps you solve them.

Problem 1: Prototyping, or, how do I build the damn thing?

With the growing popularity of the lean startup model, the pressure to shorten product development cycles and churn out a prototype application quickly and cheaply has never been greater. And, as developers, we’re doing this better at an exponential rate. Projects that once required hundreds of millions of dollars of capital in the late ‘90s became projects that you could build in a month or two with a couple tens of thousands of capital at a startup accelerator around 2008. Now, these sorts of projects are being churned out at hackathons around the country in a matter of days. As great as this seems, we can do better.

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