The MEAN stack is a popular web development stack made up of MongoDB, Express, AngularJS , and Node.js. MEAN has gained popularity because it allows developers to program in JavaScript on both the client and the server. The MEAN stack enables a perfect harmony of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) development: MongoDB stores data in a JSON-like format, Express and Node.js facilitate easy JSON query creation, and AngularJS 2 allows the client to seamlessly send and receive JSON documents.

MEAN is generally used to create browser-based web applications because AngularJS (client-side) and Express (server-side) are both frameworks for web apps. Another compelling use case for MEAN is the development of RESTful API servers. Creating RESTful API servers has become an increasingly important and common development task, as applications increasingly need to gracefully support a variety of end-user devices, such as mobile phones and tablets. This tutorial will demonstrate how to use the MEAN stack to rapidly create a RESTful API server.

AngularJS , a client-side framework, is not a necessary component for creating an API server. You could also write an Android or iOS application that runs on top of the REST API. We include AngularJS 2 in this tutorial to demonstrate how it allows us to quickly create a web application that runs on top of the API server.

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