When you look at web app development in 2023, you’ll see that one of the most popular tools commonly mentioned and used is MongoDB. It’s an open-source document database that works across platforms and operating systems. There are plenty of features that have contributed to its popularity, hence its revenue run rate hitting $1 billion in 2022 and MongoDB Atlas growing 85 percent.
Among its reasons for being the go-to choice for many developers is the fact that MongoDB is compatible with all the popular languages and frameworks in use today. Let’s dive into what these languages are, along with their current value to modern programming and development.
C
C is one of the oldest programming languages that are still actively used today. It is actually regarded as the first high-level language to be used in programming. It works very well for both modern apps and legacy ones. MongoDB, being built for high volume storage, works pretty seamlessly with this language using the libmongoc driver.
The lasting popularity of C can be credited to its speed and efficiency which still outdo many of its contemporaries. Of course, it does have some more vulnerabilities that programmers need to be aware of. Learning those is much easier, though, because C is considered one of the easier languages to understand in terms of both syntax and concept.
Python
MongoDB can easily work with Python using the pymongo driver, making the duo a good combination for web development and data mining algorithms. As a whole, Python is generally used when developing websites and software to visualize and organize data.
Database applications are the common use case you’ll see that make use of the Python language with MongoDB. The NoSQL form of MongoDB makes it a more straightforward way of storing data, resulting in a simplified database that is quicker to traverse.
Java
Java is considered one of the easiest languages to learn and compile. It should be noted, however, that it is a complex language to master. Java code ends up being more complicated and tiresome to manage as you go along. This has resulted in its popularity subsiding, making way for other languages it once ranked higher than like C# and Visual Basic.
That said, this doesn’t discount its lasting power in enterprise applications. MongoDB is compatible with this language using its Java driver, which you can usually see being used to create scalable Internet applications that need massive NoSQL databases to build on.
Java is object-oriented and has the potential to have reusable code, which can result in more efficient development as long as it is done properly. MongoDB helps in that aspect, though haphazard reusing of code can also end up doing more harm than good.
JSON
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is arguably the language most associated with MongoDB. It is most commonly used to store and transmit data in web applications. As users interact with web pages, much of the data exchanged from server to client or displayed is in the form of JSON files.
MongoDB actually stores data in BSON, which is faster to get through than JSON because of how it encodes type and length information. That said, JSON can still be stored and retrieved in the database natively.
TypeScript
TypeScript is an open-source language that is, in essence, like JavaScript except it is intended for large-scale web apps as opposed to JS’ web page object development. Because it builds off that, it also enjoys more security than other more popular languages. As noted in Mark Funk’s article on better cloud security, it is more important than ever to apply as many safeguards as possible. With the rise in cyber incidents in the wake of the pandemic, endpoint protection, encryption, and better access management will be essential in preventing damaging cyber attacks.
In order to use TypeScript with the database, you just need to use the MongoDB Node JS driver.
