We Keep Coding

Different ways of connecting frontend and backend in a MERN application and when to use which

I've created the frontend of various apps by using React where I was fetching data from some REST API someone else had created.
Regarding Node I've only used it once, in that occasion I did not use any frontend framework just vanilla JS and jQuery, and I was doing server-side rendering of the pages.
Now I want to create a simple MERN application and I am not completely sure that I'm aware of all the choices regarding the combination of frontend and backend and which one should be used when.
It would be really helpful if I could see a complete list of all the possible ways React and Node can be combined to create a full app.

If you are using front-end frameworks you use backend servers as an API. Like if you use React framework you use axios to handle http requests to your node js (express) server. But if you are using vanilla js, ejs and using server side rendering you can directly render views from your server. In case of react you can use next.js.

Creating a front end for a nest-js API

I have a question regarding creating a front-end for a nest-js API:
Will this front-end be an entirely different project with regards to folder structure?
Will it just 'call' the services from my API?
How are my controllers of the API used, if the front-end just uses the services directly?
Also, in what order does it make sense to create the front-end prior to auth? Or should it be the other way around.
Thanks

You can create separate project for frontend app, or you could return HTML directly from nest. This depends on what you want.
https://docs.nestjs.com/techniques/mvc
If you go for server side rendering (the MVC link above), then your code will have direct access to your nest services. If you go for SPA approach (angular, react, vue, ...), then you will have to call your nest API via http, so you will have access only via your API endpoints.
I guess this one is answer already - for SSR approach, you will have endpoints that return the HTML. You could combine both approaches, having group of controllers working as REST API, and another group for SSR, that will return JSON response.
About the auth - I guess you should implement the backend first, then you can implement frontend so you can test it.

How to use react with material ui along with python-django

I need help to use react with material ui components in web application.
The following key technologies i worked on for several projects:
Materialize CSS, Javascript, Jquery.
The following key technologies that i want to work with for new projects:
Material UI, React
Is it good idea to work with react or to have Angular ?
How to start making a project having both django and react with material UI components?
References :
https://medium.com/codingthesmartway-com-blog/getting-started-with-material-ui-for-react-material-design-for-react-364b2688b555
https://medium.com/#TechMagic/reactjs-vs-angular5-vs-vue-js-what-to-choose-in-2018-b91e028fa91d

Front-end and backend are two separated things.
You can use whatever database, because your backend will work with that.
You can use whatever as backend.
React/vue/angular don't care how you will be communicating with server or what backend you use.
You can start with set up frontend development for react using for instance facebook-create-react-app which would set up basic development boilerplate. You will also need to take care of client-side routing (you can use react-router and you will need some way to comunicate with your backend for example with ajax calls to get your data using ES6 fetch() or some js library like axios.
It is up to you how you will handle backend but i would recommend you to use RESTfull API with django which would be communicating with your front-end

I'm doing this on a project right now. The project was set up for me with Docker however, which I'd recommend, it's very well contained. But if you don't want to use Docker you could use create-react-app. I'd make sure this is in a separate directory from your Django project, but in the same git repo.
create-react-app will create a development server for you to develop the front end with.
You'll need a few other libraries in your React code besides Material UI to fill a couple other needs:
client-side routing, I recommend react-router (for use with MUI see this docs page)
communication with the backend Django server, I recommend GraphQL.
Traditionally you'd use a RESTful API but these are very difficult to design well and have limitations in traversability and ability to change over time. I think that GraphQL is the future of web APIs and everyone should check it out.
To implement a GraphQL API in Django you can use graphene-django which integrates well with Django's ORM (models). It's documentation is thin, but I've found it works very well.
On the client side there's a few React libraries for connecting to servers with a GraphQL API. I'm using Relay which is from the same developers as React and GraphQL, but Apollo could also be a good option depending on the state of its development.
Eventually, when you deploy the project you'll need to compile production static files out of create-react-app or Webpack or whatever you're using to compile your React code. Then put the static files in a place that can serve them on your site. If you're using a production web sever like nginx the static files can be served directly without reaching Django.

The following key technologies i worked on for several projects:
Backend : Python-Django (MySQL)
Frontend : Materialize CSS, Javascript, Jquery.
The following key technologies that i want to work with for new projects:
What does work mean? If you can write api's in the backend.Go ahead and write some api's using django framework.
Backend : Python-Django (MySQL)
Frontend : Material UI, React
So can you guys help me out to implement this.
What do u mean by implement? Go ahead and find a nice react + material ui + webpack boilerplate and start the application. Try to Consume
your backend api's through it.
Is it good idea to work with react or to have Angular ?
Long discussion,You would have got this answer if you read the article that you posted
Do i need to switch to other database ?
It depends on your project

Take a look at this https://github.com/owais/django-webpack-loader which is a good strategy for launch react build with django (i use django rest) and you can use an html in jinja template where you inject the react JS code
You can eject or use config override top override the default native webpack configuration present in react JS https://www.npmjs.com/package/config-override

I think you should see Preact, which is react integrated in any MVC templating, with that you can override some places of templates by their ids.
By this solution you can inject material ui code inside your templates form or others has you need.
For the injection you need to use custom element,
https://preactjs.com/guide/v10/web-components/#creating-a-web-component

ReactJS front-end with NodeJS backend: Rendering

I'm currently making an application using ReactJS for the front-end and NodeJS for the backend, however, I'm confused regarding how to connect those two.
I read about both, server-side rendering and client-side rendering.
I followed this tutorial (https://www.fullstackreact.com/articles/using-create-react-app-with-a-server/ ) as to how to connect my ReactJS app, which I created using creat-react-app and my node backend, however, I read that the solution of adding "proxy": "http://localhost:8000" (or whatever port node runs on) to the package.json file is only suitable for development.
Anyway, what I would like to know is: What is the best way of connecting ReactJS and Node.js if the user should be able to enter,delete or update data, which is saved to a database?

You should check out Nextjs. It is based on React and NodeJS.
I believe this is exactly what you are looking for. It is an easy-to-use framework that handles all the difficult stuff when it comes to server rendering while keeping the frontend async and dynamic. Besides that. When you get better using it, you can do in dept configuration to optimize to you need. Hope that helps.
Try out one of the examples on the git repository.

NODE and CMS with angularjs: how do they cooperate

I'm thinking about making something with the MEAN stack. I need a way to edit the content of the site, like e.g. Wordpress offers (basically a CMS).
The confusing bit is how the CMS and Angular would work together. I've looked at a CMS named Keystone, and there you have to set up some routing etc. in Node. Won't this crash with the routing you set up in Angluar?
In other CMSs I've used, the creation of the views happens on the server side. In Angular, as far as I understand, you crate a HTML template, which you can populate with data in an angular controller. This also seems like something that could crash between CMSs and Angular. Is this the case?
Is there any other quirks or similar about Angular and content managment systems I should know about, or is it usually not much problems integrating the two?

meanjs.org has a pretty good approach to this. Install meanjs. It comes with a sigin/signup and even allows you to create articles from the vanilla install.
Put simply, when you are creating a web app with the MEAN stack, think of AngularJS as "THE" app, and node.js as the api.
If you approach building your web app as a javascript application (AngularJS), that happens to get its data from an server api (node.js), then you will begin to understand how to properly use the MEAN stack.
First: Angular will have the routes defined in the $routeProvider. Build the routing urls in AngularJS first. They are "THE" routes for your web app. A good way to look at it is to build the AngularJS portion with the ability to change your api server, even to another language (PHP, python, go, etc) if necessary.
Second: Build your AngularJS to communicate to the api with $resource. Essentially a $resource is an easy way to call out to an api using restful routing. This "restful routing" is now the routing that needs to be "mimicked/copied" into the routing for the node.js routes.
Often the AngularJS routes (the url) will match the $resource routing that matches the node.js routing.
Again, take a look at meanjs.org and you will have a better understanding on how to properly organize what "seems like" (and actually are) two separate apps.

Basically, you need three sets of routes (or two if you are doing it on the cheap).
Start out with a set of routes on the server that return regular webpages. Forget about JavaScript. Do not involve Angular at this stage.
Second, add another set of routes on the server which return data in a rawer form (such as JSON). This would typically be a RESTful API.
Third, add Angular to the client. When the view needs to be updated, update the URL in the browser and use Ajax to hit the RESTful API to get the data needed to populate it. (You want the URL you set the address bar to to match the URL of the page from the first set of routes that you are duplicating with JS and the data from the RESTful route).
If you are doing it on the cheap, like Gawker did, then you would skip the first set of routes and go direct to the JS+REST approach.

I think you need CMS on MEAN stack development environment.
there are some cms on mean stack you can try.
PancilBlue
Calipso
try this.

I was trying something similar, I found this link very useful AngularJsCMS It has told about free respond cms which is based on angularjs and have the ability to create pages like wordpress and manage contents.

We have been working on a project using angular and keystonejs. Simply serve the default template layout found in keystone and inject the data-ng-view tag within the body tag. Serve this template for all requests to '/'.
Then write your angular app normally to consume endpoints. These endpoints can be done in keystone using the api middleware. In the routes/index.js file add a key/value pair in the routes object with the name of your custom endpoint then import the folder containing your endpoint function definitions.
var routes = {
views: importRoutes('./views'),
api: importRoutes('./api')
};
exports = module.exports = function(app) {
app.get('/api/posts', keystone.middleware.api, routes.api.post.index);}

I recently migrated my blog over to MEANie - a lightweight custom MEAN Stack CMS that I developed.
I made it open source for anyone to use and posted details and setup instructions on my blog at http://jasonwatmore.com/meanie.