http://www.creativeworkline.com/2014/05/meanio-vs-meanjs-comparison/
Original Posted Mai 28th, 2014 in Blog by creative workline o
The MEAN Stack
For those of you who don’t know what MEAN is exactly, I will try to make it fast and simple. The initials of the word MEAN are the combination of: MongoDB, Express,AngularJS and node.js. I will not be explaining about each one individually, as it is not the main idea of the article. MEAN is a stack framework that is combined with MongoDB, Express, AngularJS and node.js that helps creating a full JavaScript web application.
Origins
Both MEAN.io and MEAN.JS were developed by the Israeli software developer Amos Haviv, who initially developed MEAN.io and started working on it with the leading open source company in Israel, Linnovate. Now of course between freelancers and big companies, conflicts arise very easily, thus after almost one year after developing and maintaining MEAN.io, Amos “left” the MEAN.io project as Linnovate’s goals and agendas did not meet his, and at the end of last year started working on MEAN.JS.
The Differences
On the basic level:
| Framework/Aspect | MEAN.io | MEAN.JS |
| Modularity | Self-contained Node packages with client and server files inside the modules | MVC in the back-end and AngularJS in the front-end |
| Boilerplate | A custom tool called: “mean” | Yeoman Generator |
| Documentation | Good detailed documentation | High level detailed documentation |
| Community | Growing bigger and bigger. More famous. | Starting to grow bigger. Not as famous as MEAN.io, mostly because it is rather new (February 2014) |
| Forks (GitHub) | 1297 | 92 |
| Stars (GitHub) | 4284 | 467 |
| Followers (Twitter) | 511 | 446 |
| Likes (Facebook page) | 378 | 126 |
Numbers as of May 2014
Conclusions
As you can see, put all together the differences between the frameworks are really not that big, or to be more specific, not big enough to help the common developer, to decide which one is really the better, and which one he should use. The answer for big companies as I can imagine would be to work with MEAN.io, as it is already bigger and known, and to say the truth, for the short term maybe better as well. But for the long term, as said before Amos Haviv is the master mind behind the two Frameworks. And with him working on MEAN.JS, it is probably just a matter of time before MEAN.JS will grow bigger and better than MEAN.io.
Extra
There is of course a lot more to the MEAN.io MEAN.JS story. This is not part of the article, but for those of you, who are interested to know more, here is a link to the MEAN.JS blog post, where Amos Haviv explains why he started working on MEAN.JS: MEAN.JS blog.
Where to go from here?
- You should definitely check out this discussion on StackOverflow about the difference between MEAN.io and MEAN.js
- Also look at alternatives and other framworks with a slightly different scope, for example Hackathon Starter, CleverStack, and Sails.js
- Let us know your opinion, just leave a comment below