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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

The real problem with this MEAN stack for any real project is maintainability in 5 years time. You can almost guarantee that within 2 years, this stack will be semi-unsupported in favor of a newer JS library, with all the current devs and support on this stack jumping ship to better versions.

That said, this is a very awesome stack to use for hackathons and short projects or prototypes.

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Agreed. The LAMP stack did not become ubiquitous because it had a cool name, but because it was cheap and easy to build on. The name 'LAMP' was just a 'backronym' for what was already very common.

Trying to repeat the trick by coming up with another cool acronym is not a good idea.

The problem with the LAMP stack is the idea that one stack is suitable for just about any purpose. So you get developers trying to build hugely complicated algorithms with 'if' and 'for' loops in PHP and turning MySQL into an object store with ORM.

Better to use the right tool for the job, rather than the one all the cool kids are using today, or the one with the best sounding name.

We both can't foresee the future, but what makes this statement unique to this stack over another? Can't one say the same thing on any stack? What makes rails, django, php a safer bet than node / angular? The mere fact they have a longer history? Bigger community? Or the fact that we see a renaissance in JavaScript libraries in recent times? I think it's a great stack, and with TypeScript on top, even a potentially enterprise friendly one.

Please expand further. I would be very interested in what you base this comment on and examples of better versions for these.

Javascript libraries come and go, especially as Javascript is a tepidly developing language. It's very likely that in a few years the current crop of JS libraries will be out of date and people will have moved on to something else. Compare this to the relatively stable world of LAMP. Linux hasn't changed, nginx is popular but Apache is still the standard, databases come and go but MySQL is still here, and PHP is still quite a popular choice for web applications.

Will the MEAN stack stand the test of time? How many forgotten JS libraries litter the timeline of web development?

Right on. That's why I'm sticking with EJB's and Oracle.

As a user of MEBN stack for the past 2 years, I don't see this being the case for server side JavaScript. Node will still be around, and it's hard to believe Mongo is half way through its entire lifecycle.

For browser side packages, sure, there's churn. But that's true of any web stack, and at the pace browsers develop, it's worthwhile revisiting those library choices more than once a year anyway.

I think you're getting Javascript libraries confused with Javascript frameworks. Libraries have come and gone, yes, but there is a clear standard now in jQuery, and as such it's safe to assume it can be included in a stack for a long term project. Frameworks for building complex Javascript applications, however, are relatively new to the scene. One of the major offerings will eventually become the jQuery of Javascript frameworks and become the de facto standard, safe to include in a stack for a long term project as well.

jQuery has been a pretty safe bet for years. There's no reason why one of these Javascript frameworks won't also become a safe bet as well.

The real question is, are they all a safe bet now!

Angular maybe but Express? Even the longevity of Node is a gamble in my opinion.

From Express's package page on NPM:

20 765 downloads in the last day 127 921 downloads in the last week 489 285 downloads in the last month

Since it's essentially Sinatra for Node.js, I don't think it's too big of a stretch to say that it will be a part of the stack for some time.

I would say longer than Angular, as browser-side packages seem to have more churn on the basis of adoption of newer browser features.

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