MERN Stack Development

Building an end to end hybrid application which works both on phone as well as on web browsers is really exciting. Using latest technology, facing new challenges is the most enthusiastic side of a development process. MERN stack development makes us a full stack developer using MongoDB, React.js, express.js over Node.js.

img src: https://www.mongodb.com/

Let's look at each component of MERN in detail:

1. React.js: React is a declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It is the front end of MERN stack development, developed by Facebook to build interactive/reactive user interfaces. It uses a "virtual DOM." React creates an in-memory data structure cache, computes the resulting differences, and then updates the browser's displayed DOM efficiently. This allows the programmer to write code as if the entire page is rendered on each change while the React libraries only render subcomponents that actually change.
2. Express.js: Express is javascript framework which runs as a module within the Node.js environment. It is simply used to create RESTful APIs and can even generate the final HTML to be rendered by the user's browser. We can use it to access the resources from the database.
3. MongoDB: MongoDB is an open-source, document database, NoSQL data store that provides persistence for your application data and is designed with both scalability and developer agility in mind. Instead of storing data in rows and columns as one would with a relational database, MongoDB stores JSON documents in collections with dynamic schemas.
4. Node.js: It is a back-end JavaScript run time environment. It includes a number of modules that provides features essential for implementing web applications – including networking protocols such as HTTP. Third party modules, including the MongoDB driver, can be installed, using the npm tool.

We use React.js as front end in our development process, we can even use ReactNative while building hybrid mobile application for better native-like user experience. Express.js is simple usable JS framework for creating REST APIs used by React in this case. We can use "Mongoose" to make connection with MongoDB database. It provides MongoDB validation and query in a very simple manner and makes the development faster. The application works over asynchronous, event-driven Node.js runtime environment.

As a result we get an efficient, portable, developer and user friendly, high performance based hybrid JavaScript and NoSQL Application which runs both on web and mobile devices.