Background

You might ask, why a stack that is using AngularJS, Gulp, Node.js, etc.? The main answer is pretty straight-forward: it matches the current direction of MarkLogic. As of MarkLogic 8, it supports native, server-side JavaScript, natively stores JSON, and provides a Node.js client which interacts with a vastly extended MarkLogic REST API.

The MarkLogic Engineering team that builds all core functionality is building a Sample Stack using the same components. The most important difference between SampleStack and this template is that this doesn't provide a static fully-fledged (demo) application, but rather provides a base template, a toolset, and a set of readily available components.

More generally, JavaScript has become popular in all kinds of areas. It was originally used most to make websites dynamic in browsers on desktops, but mobile development has increased its popularity. Recently, it also became a popular server-side language, driven in part by developers' embrace of the convenient JSON data-interchange format. Node.js, used by this generator, is now a very popular server-side language. Gulp, which runs on Node.js and which this generator relies on, is a very popular tool for JavaScript-oriented development tasks.

And finally: AngularJS. JQuery has been pretty popular over the past decade or so. It is a powerful tool. But it doesn't blend in very naturally with HTML, and it doesn't provide an MVC-like separation of concerns. AngularJS first of all kind of brings JavaScript and HTML back together, but without the need to mess around with inline scripting. Instead it allows blending in dynamic behavior and functional components by adding mere attributes and elements. It encourages developers to break down code into reusable components, and it provides good means to write a web application with an MVC model in mind.

This is probably oversimplifying things, but it hopefully gives some background behind the choices that have been made.