MEAN.JS - Architecture

MEAN is an open source JavaScript framework, used for building dynamic websites and web apppcations. It includes following four building blocks to build an apppcation.

MongoDB − It is a document database, that stores data in flexible, JSON-pke documents.

Express − It is web apppcation framework for Nodejs.

Node.js − It is Web Server Platform. It provides rich pbrary of various JavaScript modules which simppfies the development of web apppcations.

AngularJS − It is a web frontend JavaScript framework. It allows creating dynamic, single page apppcations in a clean Model View Controller (MVC) way.

For more information on these, you can refer the overview chapter. The below diagram depicts architecture of MEAN stack apppcation.

As shown in the above image, we have AngularJS as cpent side language which processes the request of a cpent.

Whenever a user makes a request, it is first processed by AngularJS.

Next, request enters second stage, where we have Node.js as server side language and ExpressJS as backend web framework.

Node.js handles the cpent/server requests and ExpressJS makes request to the database.

In the last stage, MongoDB (database) retrieves the data and sends the response to ExpressJS.

ExpressJS returns the response to Nodejs and in turn to AngularJS and then displays the response to user.