What are MERN Stack Best Practices?

MERN is a popular Web Development Tech Stack that facilitates coding tasks through high-quality and scalable technologies. You must consider its best practices to get the best out of your coding process. It's essential to keep up with the new approaches to software so you can bring to life top-notch full-stack solutions. Today, you'll learn some of the best methods to implement the MERN Stack successfully.

What is MERN Stack?

When we talk about the MERN Stack, we focus on the blend of its four fantastic technologies: MongoDB, Express, React, and Node. Conceived by Facebook in 2013, MERN Stack looks through its technologies to make the software development process more effective and simple. It's popular for several reasons, considering that developers can create web apps using a single language (JavaScript) for the Front and Back-End. It integrates a shallow learning curve and great community support, facilitating debugging. MERN has many packages and libraries to provide high flexibility and scalability, making it suitable for many use cases, from small start-ups to large enterprises.

Best Practices for MERN Stack

As mentioned, MERN Stack comprises four technologies that provide an end-to-end solution for building more modern and advanced applications. Let's divide the best practices according to each technology to facilitate learning.

MongoDB Best Practices

MongoDB is a document-oriented NoSQL database management system. In turn, we can mention Mongoose, a popular JavaScript library for MongoDB, which you can use for defining a scheme for your documents to guarantee a consistent structure and validation of their properties. Also, you can use middleware, useful for data validation or registration, in addition to using lean queries that, by default, Mongoose provides fully-populated documents from queries. Additionally, you can use the function .lean() to return a plain JavaScript object without format.

Express.js Best Practices

Express.js, the only application framework of the group, is ideal for building server-side applications with Node.js. One of the best practices is its power for harnessing middleware, which is perfect for data validation, authentication, and registration. Moreover, you must enable HTTP caching to reduce the requests to the server and improve the app. To do so, you can use a template engine to render the HTML page, write simple HTML, and facilitate code reuse. Remember to use error-handling middleware to detect and handle errors in your routes or middleware functions to ensure that your entire application doesn't crash and that users receive the appropriate error messages. Finally, just like Node.js, it's necessary to use PM2 or Node.js cluster as a process manager.

React.js Best Practices

React is a Javascript library for building User Interfaces that excell user expectations. As a best practice, you must use functional, simpler, and easier-to-test than class-based components. Also, it's necessary to integrate hooks that let you manage state and side effects in your functional components instead of using class-based components. Likewise, you can use the hooks useMemo and useCallback to optimize the performance of its components, avoiding unnecessary renderings. Use context API to pass data down the component tree without passing props through multiple levels. To conclude React's practices, it's necessary to bet on using the React Developer Tools browser extension to debug and inspect your React components.

Node.js Best Practices

Node.js is a JavaScript environment for building scalable network apps characterized by its high performance and capacity to handle large simultaneous connections. The different practices include using the async/await syntax to write asynchronous code to facilitate reading and debugging, managing concurrent connections, and tasks that might take a while to process, such as getting data from servers. You must also use commonJS or ES modules to organize its code into small, reusable pieces. You should also consider using a memory cache like Redis or Memcached to reduce your application's memory load. And finally, it's recommended to use a process manager like PM2 or Node.js Cluster.

What to Consider for MERN Stack Development?

Other practices can be incorporated into MERN Stack, including:

MERN Stack Modular Architecture

MERN Stack uses a modular architecture where each component is isolated from other components. This type of architecture allows easy application maintenance and updating. Therefore, if the component changes, it won't affect other components.

MERN Stack Code Reusability

MERN Stack allows efficient code reusability. Using React, stack developers can create reusable components that can use later in other apps, saving time, reducing the amount of written code, and consolidating an efficient development process.

MERN Stack State Management

State Management in React is used to store and manage the component data. The state must be handled in a central location, like a store, to guarantee its accessibility in all full-stack MERN applications. A State Management Library, like Redux, is recommended as it provides a consistent form.

MERN Stack Linting Tools

Linting tools verify the code's quality and guarantee that it meets standards. In short, these tools help to maintain code quality and coherence, facilitating the app's maintenance and update. Some linting tools that you can use are ESLint and Prettier.

MERN Stack Documentation

The documentation is important since it provides a reference for other developers who may need to work on the app in the future. This documentation must include information about architecture, used components, and how to use the application. Full-stack developers should create clear, concise, and easy-to-understand documentation.

MERN Stack Testing

With MERN Stack, developers can use different test tools like Jest, Mocha, and Chai. Unit tests can prove individual components, while integration tests allow you to test the interactions between components.

MERN Stack CI/CD

Continuos Integration (CI) refers to collecting and testing code changes when committed to the codebase. Likewise, Continuous Deployment (CD) is the practice of deploying code changes to production after the CI process. Developers can use CI/CD to ensure code changes are implemented quickly and efficiently without manual intervention.

MERN Stack Version Control Systems

Version Control Systems like Git allow developers to collaborate on code, track changes, and return to previous versions if necessary. Using a version control system is important to guarantee that the base code is always updated and facilitate collaboration with other developers.

MERN Stack with Docker

Docker is a popular tool used to package and deploy containerized applications. Using Docker, devs can implement and execute applications easily on any platform that supports it, optimizing application management and scaling as containers are deployed and run on any platform.

MERN Stack Scalability

Scalability is one of MERN Stack's best qualities. Developers can use load balancing and horizontal scaling techniques to ensure the application handles increasing traffic levels. Planning it from the beginning to scale the application as needed is important.

MERN Stack UX

All developers should create easy-to-use and intuitive User Interfaces (UIs), considering performance, speed, and responsiveness. Beyond these practices, knowing about MERN hosting is necessary, considering that choosing the best fit is crucial to your app's success.

In security terms, betting on input validation, data sanitization, and password hashing recommendations is necessary. To protect sensitive data, you should also use secure protocols like HTTPS for all communications between the front and back end. In addition, it's important to implement authentication and authorization processes. When discussing code quality and maintainability, you must follow practices such as using descriptive variable names, commenting on your code, and organizing your code into compact, reusable functions and components. Remember to debug your front-end and back-end code through tools like Chrome DevTools and Node.js debugger to log errors and exceptions to help diagnose problems.

Conclusion

It's important to keep up with the latest trends on the MERN Stack through tips like following industry experts, reading blogs, attending conferences, and experimenting with new tools and popular web development technologies! Knowing the MERN stack requires deeply understanding its components and interactions. For this reason, you should follow the best practices we've mentioned in this blog to have a solid background, key concepts, and technical knowledge and success when building user interfaces.