What is MEEN Stack?

The terms MEEN, MERN, LAMP, PERN, etc are often encountered while using the internet. These are web stacks consisting of a bundle of software and frameworks or libraries which are used for building full-stack web apps. A stack usually consists of a database, server-side and client-side technologies, a web server, a particular Operating system. Sometimes back-end technologies are cross-platform hence no particular OS.

MEEN is a web application stack used to develop web applications from end to end(Client and server-side). This stack comprises JavaScript libraries and frameworks.
MEEN stands for:

• M- MongoDB
• E- ExpressJS
• E- EmberJS
• N- NodeJS

Ember is a client-side framework while Node, Express, and Mongo are used on the server-side. MongoDB is a NoSQL database to store data. Node is a Server-side technology while express is a framework based on Node.

Components of MEEN Stack

1. MongoDB: It is a No SQL database it has JSON-like Documents. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. MongoDB has a Binary JSON format termed BSON which increases efficiency and can be indexed and searched fast also with more performance.

Why use MongoDB?

• When you want to scale the level of reading and writing traffic.
• Has great community support, hence it is easy to get help when stuck.
• Has enterprise-grade support.
• Highly scalable.
• It has geospatial support.
• Insertion/Deletion of fields have less to no impact on the application, hence it is also flexible in nature.

2. ExpressJS: It is a web framework based on NodeJS that helps in server-side tasks and build web apps. It is free and open-source software. With backend tasks, APIs can be built with express.

Why use ExpressJS?

• It makes backend coding simpler.
• It supports many middlewares.
• It is a minimal and flexible web application framework.
• It has a robust set of features for both web and mobile applications.
• It is helpful in creating an efficient and robust API quickly and easily.

3. EmberJS: EmberJS has the following features:

• It is a client-side framework.
• EmberJS is open-source.
• It provides a new binding syntax as it uses the HTML bars template engine.
• Also, another engine the Glimmer Rendering Engine helps in increase the rendering speed.
• It is used for creating reusable JavaScript web apps.

It was developed by Yehuda Katz with an initial release on 8th December 2011.

Why use EmberJS?

• Ember is back-ward compatible hence provides stability and the older versions running will not face issues.
• Has 800+ contributors on GitHub and has good community support on StackOverflow as well.
• Potent Add ons.
• Has excellent documentation.
• Built on glimmer rendering engine hence has high performance.

4. N stands for NodeJS: It is a server-side technology used to run JS on the server. Cross-Platform and open source. Pre-requisites to learn NodeJS is to first learn JavaScript. It runs on a V8 engine and helps in building fast and scalable applications.

Why use NodeJS?

• It is highly scalable.
• It is highly extensible.
• It provides event-driven asynchronous features which makes it lightweight.
• It provides caching.
• It contains a vast number of libraries.
• It handles thousands of concurrent connections with a single server.