TriAngular Notes - MEAN Stack

Angular And The MEAN Stack

2014-05-22 by Darrough West[1] (Meetup)

[1] Another gentleman co-presented, but I never caught his name.

MEAN

• Package management (npm and bower)
• Task manager (grunt)
• Testing baked in
• Obfuscation baked in (cssmin and uglify)
• jshint
• Social baked in (Passport)
• Fully functional frontend and backend example

Why?

• Increasingly hard to find "good" PHP devs
• Wanted to get away from custom frameworks
• Upgrade everyone's skillsets
• Node and Angular have matured
• Package availability

How?

• Download project from GitHub and follow instructions
  • Why not just follow the instructions on the homepage? ($ npm install -g meanio; mean init myApp)
• Heroku for hosting
• MongoHQ for database

MEAN.IO Versus MEAN.js

• MEAN.js is a fork of MEAN.IO
• Recently more or less feature parity
• Just use MEAN.IO

Bad

• No release/snapshot (in heavy active development)
• Packages are pulled from "latest"
  • Take a look at npm-shrinkwrap
• Node has views
  • This point was confusing. It sounded like they were maintaining two sets of views (frontend and backend)

Mongo

• Migrated from MySQL to MongoHQ
  • Use replica set!

Express

• Need to proxy to port 3000 (no good reason)
  • Not really issue on Heroku
• connect-assetmanager takes getting used to

Node

• Use async!
• Remember to clean up your packages

Angular

• Don't overload $scope and $rootScope
• Use HTML5 polyfills and Respond.js
• Don't put jQuery in controller
• Prefer angular.element instead of $