Angular Seed Project with LoopBack

Around a month ago I published a post about my Angular Seed Project with Firebase. Since then I tried to promote this seed to a couple of friends in Germany, who were not really happy to host their data on Firebase. So I started to refactor the back-end to LoopBack, which is an awesome JavaScript framework for rapid back-end development based on Express. I used LoopBack for my latest major consulting project and think that the development experience is awesome. There is a great client SDK for Angular, which makes connecting an Angular front-end super easy. Both AngularJS and Angular are supported, so I could just attach my Angular front-end and replace the Firebase AuthService with a LoopBack version. It even supports Firebase-like real-time communication via the FireLoop platform.

Meanwhile I also decided to replace MongoDB with a PostgreSQL database. I know that document data stores are nowadays quite popular, but the explicit schemas of relational databases have advantages in the long run, in my opinion. They make sure that you have to think about migrations whenever you change the data and forces some kind of versioning of data and API, which reduces the risks of complex errors when your app grows. This great blog post of Scott Nonnenberg was quite inspiring and it gives a good overview of best practices for future-proof JavaScript back-ends.

Finally, I am now running on a stack of PostgreSQL + LoopBack + Angular + Node.js, which I call the “PLAN stack” 😃. Though I am not the first one who came up with the idea. I still think the new seed project for my PLAN stack is a good starting point for modern web applications:

https://github.com/ng-lisbon/angular-loopback-seed

Check out our trainings at ng-lisbon if you want to learn more about Angular and the PLAN stack!

I am happy to get any feedback, let me know what you think about the seed. Is it useful, and what could be improved?