Mern Stack

MERN Stack Course

MERN Stack Training Materials

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Overview ⌘

• What is MERN stack?
• MERN stack included technologies
• How is it better/worse than the good old LAMP Stack?

MERN acronym ⌘

• MongoDB - MongoDB
• Express.js - Express
• React - React
• Node.js - Node
• In Danish it means - "more" (-;

What do we have on board? ⌘

• The Mern Stack is
  • a fullstack javascript framework built with MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, Node.js
  • a solution that helps you build fast, robust, and maintainable production web applications

Why do we need it? ⌘

• Flexibility, simplicity, and performance
• When the simplicity and common structure make our life easier
• A clean, coherent mechanism for moving data from user to disk farm and back again
  • MongoDB offers a more flexible, accommodating layer for storing data
  • Node.js provides a better nexus for running our server
  • Express helps standardize how we build our websites
  • React provides a clean way of adding interactive functions and AJAX-driven rich components

The reasons in more depth ⌘

• Cloud orientated MongoDB
• The server layer simplified with Node.js
• Isomorphic code
• JSON everywhere
• Superfast is Node.js, indeed
• React is simple

Cloud orientated MongoDB ⌘

• MERN stack offers a compelling database layer in MongoDB, if our web app plans include embedding it in the cloud
• Modern database equipped with: automatic sharding, full cluster support, failover support and automatic replication
• MongoDB's document structure is far more flexible (projects in flux and dealing with data which is tricky to constrain in table form)
  • To compare, MySQL’s structure is confining (tables and their normalization requirements, etc)
• Cheap disk space (multiple terabytes rather then megabytes)
  • Relational DBs have JOINs to save disk space, but they can be tricky and hard on RAM
  • Some database designers end up de-normalizing their data because the JOINs are too slow

The server layer simplified with Node.js ⌘

• Navigating the various layers of the LAMP stack can be difficult - shuffling through various config files with differing syntax
• Node.js put this kind of pipework all in one place, all in one language, all in one pile of logic
  • Changes how our app routes requests, with small js code and the rest is handled by Node.js
  • Changes the logic used to answer queries
  • Rewrites URLs or constructs an odd mapping
  • Less different documentations references
  • No more different config files for everything
• Having everything in one layer means
  • less confusion and less chance of strange bugs created by weird interactions between multiple layers

Isomorphic code ⌘

Isomorphic code con't ⌘

• By going MERN, we can enjoy that same JavaScript on the client and the server
  • Leave behind the LAMP stack’s client/server schizophrenia
• If we write code for Node and decide it’s better placed in React
  • We can move it over with ease
  • And we run it the same way
• Programming MERN-based apps is significantly easier
• Staffing up a project
  • No need to look for a PHP expert and a JavaScript expert
  • Or a front-end and a back-end specialist
  • Instead, it’s all JavaScript across the stack

JSON everywhere ⌘

JSON everywhere con't ⌘

• React and MongoDB both speak JSON, as do Node.js and Express
• The data flows neatly among all the layers without rewriting or reformatting
• MERN uses the same JSON format for data everywhere
  • Which makes it simpler and saves time reformatting as it passes through each layer
• JSON’s ubiquity through the MERN stack makes working with external APIs that much easier
  • GET, manipulate, present, POST, and store all with one format
• MySQL’s native format for answering queries is not reusable
• PHP already has the code to import MySQL data and make it easy to process
  • But that doesn’t help the client layer
• Of course there are so many well-tested PHP libraries that convert the data easily
  • But it all seems a bit inefficient and confusing

Superfast is Node.js, indeed ⌘

Superfast is Node.js, indeed con't ⌘

• These days Node.js is often flat out faster than Apache
  • A number of benchmarks show that Node.js offers better performance, while doing much more
  • Node.js event-driven architecture is quicker
  • Shaving even milliseconds off our app’s performance is important and Node.js can do that
  • While offering a Turing-complete mechanism for reprogramming it
• Dominant platforms like WordPress or Drupal have great libraries of php code
• Node.js has NPM, package manager, which makes it even easier to share code
  • The public repositories targeting Node.js are growing quickly

React is simple ⌘

React is simple con't ⌘

• LAMP doesn’t include an analog to R in MERN
  • If we want to do anything on the client side, we’re on our own
  • There are plenty of good PHP-based frameworks that work with MySQL: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc
    • Each is a bit different and moving in its own direction
    • They offer differing strategies, and it’s hard to switch between them, let alone port code from one to the other
• Anointing one client framework adds consistency and stability

React is modern con't 2 ⌘

• React was built by folks with 20 years of experience building web apps
  • They knew well enough to leave the design work to HTML and CSS
  • They also figured out how to add a bit of JavaScript to scan the HTML
  • They looked at what humans do well, then tailored the JavaScript to support the humans
  • The components system and the logic layers are dramatically cleaner than what we’ve seen before
    • They figured out simpler ways to leverage the local power of JavaScript to guess what we are doing (UI)

Not only alternatives ⌘

• Google's Angular - Angular
• Emberjs - Ember (wanna see the real-life example?)
• Vuejs - Vue
• " **** " - take a noun, add ".js" and probably it will be existing library already there (-;

MERN quick-starters, frameworks ⌘

• Nextjs
  • Next.js stack
• Bitnami
  • Bitnami's mean stack
• Mean.js (atm AngularJS only)
  • Meanjs

• React Bootstrap
  • https://react-bootstrap.github.io/

https://v2.grommet.io/

https://www.gatsbyjs.com/

Our Course Plan ⌘

In overall

• React will appear in all of the 5 days, each day providing something new and meaningful
• Also each day will provide something more extended and more difficult, what can be done with React
• We will cover
  • React basics and later we will extend it (also Typescript, if necessary)
  • node.js and express.js (also other useful related node-based middle-wares from npm community)
  • Mongodb and Mongoose.js (also simpler node-based db connectors like mongodb)