An engineering professional with an entrepreneurial drive, Milind is passionate about scaling up businesses globally

It feels like just yesterday that every-one was raising eyebrows at MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS and Node.js, and this was back when they were all doing great work in their own departments. Now the four of them have decided to team up and start conquering together and that's not all, they managed to get a lot of help from their competitors at LAMP.MEAN, which is short for
• Mongo DB (database system)
• Express (back-end web framework)
• Angular.js (front-end framework)
• Node.js (back-end runtime environment)

These were a complete work of progress since the different elements in this power team came about at different times. Al-though they have done a lot together, every-thing ended up being bound by the glue that developers call js. What's the big deal about MEAN anyway?

What are the Upsides of Using MEAN?
MEAN works well with the MVC pattern, especially when using their NoSQL's native JSON to transfer their data. They manage to get this done thanks to Node.js and it's js module library which is open sourced. Using the flexibility of Angular.JS it creates beautiful mobile friendly applications and these can be added to the JS testing framework with almost no effort. If businesses are looking to scale this is the stack that they should stick with, especially since it has a uniformity of language across the application.

Since it makes use of js while working on both the frontend and the backend, developers who spend their time on the client side of the application can understand the code used at the server side with almost no effort. Further, if they make use of a NoSQL database they would make upon time spent handling SQL, since they would have more flexibility with the way that the information is structured, finally increasing the productivity of the team over the long haul.

What are the Variations of Using MEAN?
If you don't want to go with the MEAN framework, there is always the MEEN framework which is basically the same MEAN stack with the exception

of AngularJS, which has been substituted with Ember.js.

The Upsides of being MEAN
There are a bunch of reasons why MEAN is the better bet when it comes to picking the right stack for your application. It should be mentioned, though a large part of the equation would depend on the type of projects you are working on. Here are a few points why it works well.
• Completely open source and uses js (+ JSON and HTML) along with Web standards
• Has a large group of people using it, so there is a lot of support
• Using the same language all through this stack makes it consistent and well structured
• js (web language)
• JSON (web data format)
• There's no communication with the database
• Standard models from the front-end to the back-end and vice versa
• Uses js which is a much better framework than jQuery
• Provides complete front end development right from the beginning

MEAN is a full stack js framework and since it is fairly new there is a steep learning curve when it comes to getting everything up and running

The Downsides of Using LAMP in this Day and Age
There is a lot to say about pros and cons of using LAMP and why it was a better idea before MEAN came around, but here we have mentioned why it is no longer the smartest idea in the market
• There are better and faster alternatives to a web server than Apache
• Writing readable, reusable and quick PHP code can be quite challenging
• Front-end works well with other languages over the backend
• There are just too many conversions from one from XML to PHP to HTML and so on
• It does not have a separate server side and client side development mechanism

Now to Take the Two Contenders and Compare them to Each Other
We all know that web stacks like most technologies is not constant and has developed and evolved over decades, thanks to new backend languages and improvements in technology. There are a lot of different components when comparing a web stack from operating system to server software, to the database and finally to the backend language. Let's break down two of the most popular stacks relying on two completely different components and find out which one is ideal:

1. The MEAN stack has its hands on Angular which is a relatively popular frontend framework. There is no specific framework requirement in a LAMP stack but developers are allowed to use their own depending on the app being built.

2. When it comes to the operating system, the LAMP stack uses a version of LINUX, which has always been the best choice for a server environment, no matter which stack is being used. MEAN works using the same OS.

3. The server operating system is the OS of the computer but has nothing to do with the web server operating system. For the web server operating system, developers would have to use Apache or Nginx.

4. Apache is one of the most stable choices out there making it the frontrunner in the LAMP stack as well. MEAN gets their fix from the Node.js server.