One of my favorite things with Yii is the Gii (Generator).
With a few clicks I could simply add a few Models/Controllers/Views (or all of the above), then build/customize those.

MeanJS uses the Yeoman/Yo generator to make this happen.
After installing Yeoman generator (which I believe we already installed when we installed MeanJS) via:

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npm install -g yo

Now to install the MeanJS generator package:

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npm install -g generator-meanjs

(remember, often when running npm install -g you’ll need to sudo it)

Basic CRUD

For those who are not familiar with the concept, CRUD stands for - Create, Read, Update & Delete.
These are the basics one needs to present & manipulate data on a website, and a lot of web frameworks generate CRUDs as sort of a first-step.
Let's create our first CRUD:

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yo meanjs:crud-module firstmodule

After selecting the supplemental folder to include in the Angular Module, and whether or not the module should be added to the menu, a bunch of files are generated.
Very Important: The crud-module generates both the Server side & Client files.

The Module Structure was explained thoroughly on Basics of MeanJS.

The crud-module is the all encompassing, there are also sub generators:

  • angular-module
  • angular-route
  • angular-controller
  • angular-view
  • angular-service
  • angular-directive
  • angular-filter
  • angular-config
  • angular-test
  • express-model
  • express-controller
  • express-route
  • express-test

Those names are pretty self explanatory, so I don't see much need to go deeper there.

More information about Yeoman generator specifically used for MeanJS can be found here

As you can probably notice, this article came out a bit shorter than expected, this is mainly due to time constraints.

I'd like to continue and develop under MeanJS, as I see a lot of interest on the subject.

There are also a few other frameworks that I started reading about that might be a part of some future articles (some are fairly similar).

Bonus info: MeanJS was on the Changelog podcast!, very cool.