TLDR: The parallels between an Angular and NestJS app are striking. You can share types, functions et al between the two platforms, allowing you, an Angular developer, to write a fully featured Backend application using Angular paradigms.
My thoughts on the term “Fullstack” are firmly attached to a pendulum. It’s currently swinging in the region of “there is no such thing”. Each discipline alone is too broad to have in-depth knowledge on both. You may be able to spin up an API server with Express, but that doesn’t make you “Fullstack”.
Nevertheless, the term Fullstack is present in our industry and I've seen a number of job postings that have a React + NodeJS pairing. This got me thinking about what the stack would be in the Angular ecosystem. Behold, NestJS.
We recently had to build a feature that required some Restful APIs. In order not to be blocked, we went down the "easier" 🤨 route of creating our own with NodeJS. We were already using Nx to manage our monorepo so it was trivial to add NestJS to our project.
The learning curve was next to nothing. NestJS was heavily inspired by Angular, so you'll feel right at home. TypeScript, Decorators, Services, Modules etc are all featured in Nest. It also does a really good job at abstracting some key concepts when it comes to creating Restful API's. HTTP response codes are automatically returned. Get, Post methods and a majority of other enhanced functionality are handled by decorators.
The biggest barrier I find when learning a new framework or library is the documentation and lack of available resources. Thankfully this is not an issue with NestJS. The docs are beautiful and due to the rise in popularity of Nest, there are a ton of helpful resources. In addition to that, there are schematics for the Angular CLI, so scaffolding is a breeze.
Eventually, I see the Angular + Nest stack becoming the de facto for full stack Angular Applications. The low barrier to entry for Angular developers makes it a dream pairing.
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