Comparative Analysis for Web Applications Based on REST Services: MEAN Stack and Java EE Stack

The use of REST (Representational State Transfer Protocol) web services has increased and has become the most widely used implementation today. The most crucial part of a web development project based on REST services is the choice of the right tools for the front-end, back-end, and database environment. The main objective of this work is to test the MEAN stack as an effective solution for a web application based on REST services. JavaScript has been the client-side programming language running in the browser. The MEAN stack consists of MongoDB (database), Node.js. (web server), Express (back-end), and Angular (front-end) to build web applications. We compare the MEAN stack with a very popular stack such as Java EE that groups MongoDB (database), Apache/Tomcat (web server), Spring boot (back-end) and JSP/HTML/CSS (front-end), with respect to its components, features, and environment configuration. Two similar applications were built with the MEAN and Java EE stacks. We compared and analyzed several features and test criteria such as response time, performance, and data loading.