The building of the webpages : The comparison study of MERN and MEVN

Abstract: The ecosystem of JavaScript is rapidly changing and regularly a new framework or library is introduced claiming to have better features than its predecessors. This makes the decision- making process in choosing one framework over the other very challenging for the developers. This study aims to give a guideline to the reader in the process of decision making by comparing the runtime performance of the MERN (MongoDB, Express, React.js and Node.js) and MEVN (V stands for Vue.js) stack as well as increasing their viability in the job market by giving them an insight into the Swedish-based companies preference of software stacks in building single page applications. To fulfill the purpose, an experiment is conducted to determine how fast the mentioned stacks perform in building a single page application. For the experiment two simple to-do applications are built with MERN and MEVN and loading time, adding time, updating and deleting time of the tasks are measured. According to the results gathered, both MERN and MEVN performed similarly when executing the CRUD operations in the experiment. It must be noted that the run-time performance comparison was based on DOM manipulation of text-only content and due to the limited time frame, no image rendering was included in the applications. Moreover, to be able to reveal the software stack trend among the Swedish-based companies, a survey study was conducted. Out of approximately 70 companies contacted, 12 responded. Due to the low number of respondents on the survey drawing conclusions from the survey and generalizing, the result was challenging. However, the results gathered show that all the respondents use either Vue.js or React.js or both as their client-side software though they are not always combined with Node.js and MongoDB. Other preferred server-side software that are used in combination with React.js or Vue.js are Java, Go and Django. Some of the main factors that the respondents pointed out that affects their choice of software was the ease of learning, the community behind the software, clients’ need and availability of that specific software developers.