What I am going to write about is a real time chat proof of concept which I have done in 2014. It is now at Github. A demo can be found at http://nodejslim.herokuapp.com/

MEAN Stack

MEAN stack is a software bundle with Mongodb, Express, AngularJS and NodeJS.

What this Repo do.

• It uses Node.js -- a web server that use a event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient.
• To make use of this non blocking attributes, we use an asynchronous non-blocking nosql database MongoDB.
  • FYI, mysql and postgresql still have no good asynchronous support at this point of time.
  • As a real time chat system, it has to store many data, a relational database will be too hard to scale and also to partition it easily.
• To setup this server quickly while maintaining a good architecture, we use express as a web framework for Node.js.
• For the frontend, we use AngularJS as Javascript MVC framework. Everything will serve restfully from Node.js to AngularJS.

Some comment

• Node.JS is using ECMAScript 5(current javascript syntax), therefore the code is not so clean. With the future ECMAScript 6 become mainstream, I believe that it will be easier to code for nodeJS.
• Need to make sure everything is asynchronous, and use promise when needed.