Angular and Nest idea for fullstack apps

I’ve recently worked on a project where we found ourselves in the situation where we was waiting for some APIs to be developed by the backend team. So in order to not stop our development we decided to look at creating mock APIs.

Now there are many online services that can provide you with a mock end point to work with, but there are limitations with the number of endpoints you can make or the structure of the data you can return.

So we decided to take a look at using NestJS in order to create our mock APIs. First impressions were really positive, as an Angular developer I found getting started with Nest very easy. With Nest using similar concepts to Angular (Services, Modules etc) I found Nest a great way of adding a backend to my Angular application, Nest is something I plan to look at further.

I can see that there will be two approaches to creating a fullstack application, one approach seems to be ReactJS with Node/Express and the second approach is Angular and Nest. If you look at the job market you’ll see a lot of roles where the tech stack is React and Node in order to create a complete fullstack application. Now with Nest becoming more and more popular I can see Angular and Nest becoming a tech stack for creating a fullstack application.

If we look at how Nrwl are developing enterprise applications they are taking this approach of using Angular with Nest as their stack for their clients. As a side note when we decided to create our mock APIs we was using Nrwl’s Nx service, which makes managing the setup of a complete Angular/Nest application so easy and with the addition of Cypress it makes a fantastic complete approach to creating a full stack application.

As an Angular developer I would recommend that any Angular developers look at using Nest even if the applications they build are using APIs created in another language by another team within their organisation. The reason I think we should look at Nest is because if, like I did in this application, you have to wait for the ‘real’ APIs to be ready you could use Nest to create a mock APIs.

Eventually I can see the Angular/Nest approach becoming a standard way of building fullstack applications, which is something I’m planning to work on while I’m between projects.