What is a Stack? — Coding for Beginners

What is a Stack? — Coding for Beginners

Web developers throw around this word often saying things like “what’s your stack” or I'm a MEAN stack developer” or “my stack is rails and angular.”

A “stack” is a piece of slang that roughly means “the different technologies that I use to make a website”.

Most websites are built using different layers of technologies, and they have similar concerns. For example, every website needs a place to store information. Typically that’s a database like Postgres, MySQL, or MongoDB. That would be one layer within your stack.

Every website needs a way to respond to HTTP requests, that’s called a “server side framework” There are many options there like Express, Rails, Django, .NET MVC.

Also, optionally, a website will use a client side framework, like Angular, Ember or React and Redux to make performant, responsive and very interactive web applications.

Combined, these three options, the client side framework, the aerv r side framework, and the database layer, make up a “stack”

Since it's basically slang, some developers expand this definition to include more decisions about how to make a web application, for example including the container management system, the static web server, the particular cloud or infrastructure provider.