Getting MEAN With TypeScript
I have been doing a lot of research into the MEAN stack as of late in hopes of possibly using in on my next project. First I wanted to see if using TypeScript was viable, because I come from a .NET background and strong types help me find problems at compile time. Then I wanted to see if I could get some sort of debugging experience. I remember the good ol’ days of Classic ASP scripting and having to debug write everything so I could get a picture of what was happening.
Editor(s)
So many to choose from in this department. Personally I chose WebStorm because it afforded me that debugging experience I was looking for in the IDE. SublimeText and VS Code are excellent options as well, but like I said… Debugging.
Getting Lessons
My first round of searches brought me to an excellent video tutorial by Brad Traversy on MEAN Stack Front To Back. It’s a series in which you’ll use ES6 to create a MEAN stack application that does some simple authentication. It’s a great series, I highly suggest watching it and checking out the code here. It uses ES6 and like I said, I’m looking for TypeScript.
My next round of searching brought me to Brian Love’s blog where he has an article TypeScript2 + Express + Mongoose + Mocha + Chai. Whew! That’s a mouth full, and a lot of tech to learn. It’s a fantastic article about combining all those technologies to get a running MEAN stack application with testing. Check out his article here and certainly check out the code here.
Combo
My mission was to combine the two projects to make one MEAN application with a TypeScript and test driven backend and an Angular2 front end. I was able to take the lessons learned about TypeScript, Grunt, Mocha and Chai and apply it to the meanauthapp created in Brad’s videos. It makes for very easy and type-safe development with NodeJS. Big thanks to both Brian and Brad for their work!