# Tech Stack
MEAN vs MERN comparison and contrast.

## Table of Contents
<ol>
<li>What is a tech stack?</li>
<li>Which tech stacks?</li>
<li> Angular and React advantages</li>
<li>Popular apps</li>
<li>Summary</li>
</ol>

### What is a tech stack?
Loosely defined as a list of all the technology services used to build and run an application. There are several things to consider when choosing your tech stack because it can either make or break your application. Most importantly you need to understand your problems and set goals and objectives for your application.

### Which tech stacks?
We're discussing the MEAN stack and the MERN stack.
MEAN stack includes MongoDB, Express, Angular and Node.js.
MERN stack includes MongoDB, Express, React.js and Node.js. Both the MEAN and the MERN stack qualify as fullstack, this means that they are able to build the frontend and the backend of the application. A fullstack application is cost saving and the developer has the advantage of switching between frontend and backend depending on the developer's task.
<ul>
<li>MongoDB is a cross platform document oriented database that is scalable, fast,schemaless,uses JavaScript data stored in the form of JSON, has a simple environment setup and flexible document model.</li>
<li>Express is a node.js framework. Express promotes code reusability with its built in router.</li>
<li>Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment that allows the user to run their code on the server.</li>
</ul>

Now let us look at what the frontend and the backend include.

#### Front-end (aka client side)
The frontend is also referred to as the client side of the app. The frontend is the visual side, what the end user sees. The frontend consist of HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
<ul>
<li>Hypertext markup language (HTML) is the building block of webpages.</li>
<li>Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is responsible for making web pages look appealing. Think of CSS as salt to food. Food without salt is tasteless and boring, that is the same thing with HTML code without a good layout,interactivity or styling. Nobody wants to use an app that isn't visually appealing.</li></ul>

### Backend (aka the server side)
Backend is often referred to as the server side of the application, basically the behind the scenes. There is activity but the user doesn't see the activity going on. The server side also includes a database wheredata is collected from the frontend and stored. There are also frameworks that support the programming languages, we will discuss the frameworks along the way.
The server side can be built using different programming languages.

<ul>
<li>JavaScript</li>
<li>C</li>
<li>C++</li>
<li>C#</li>
<li>Python</li>
<li>Go</li>
<li>PHP</li>
<li>Java</li>
</ul>

## React advantages
<ol>
<li>Cross-platform support friendly</li>
<li>Easy to adopt</li>
<li>Reusable components </li>
<li>SEO friendly</li>
</ol>

## Angular advantages
<ol>
<li>Efficient problem solving patterns</li>
<li>High speed and perormance</li>
<li>Readable code</li>
<li>Development process is faster</li><br>

The most important advantage of the MEAN stack is that the entire code is in JavaScript and is open source.

### Popular apps built in MEAN and MERN
There are other apps built using both tech stacks, however for the purpose of the article we're toning down to two each teck stack.

### MEAN
<ul>
<li>Forbes</li>
<li>YouTube</li>
</ul>

### MERN
<ul>
<li>Netflix</li>
<li>Facebook</li>
</ul>

## Conclusion
Most times there are a lot of pros and cons overlapping making things tricky when choosing a tech stack. The process is harder when choosing a framework as a developer but it ultimately comes down to defining your problem like we discussed earlier on.