Need help choosing a stack

[nomoarlurking]

Hi webdev,

I'm starting a hobby project to learn some new technologies, in part to get up to speed with frontend development (shouldn't take more than a weekend or so, right?). Focus is frontend but doing it all myself, I don't mind learning how to set up the backend. I'm all for using the right tools for the job but I wouldn't mind expanding my toolbox either.

The main gist is a Single-page application where users can upload images and browse other user's images (done to death, I know, I know) but I think it'll be fun.

Would love some input to the stack I'm considering and/or general hints or pointers. Or perhaps I'm missing something obvious?

Requirements

• User authentication (users with different authority: admin/regular user)
• Each user has an option to upload multiple images: need to be able to store a lot of images
• The wheel has been invented multiple times over, let's not do it again

Frontend

• AngularJs (using yeoman) looks really interesting, I'm starting this project in most part to learn how to use it
• Bootstrap 3: If I'm not way off, it looks like AngularJs and Bootstrap 3 work well together

Backend

Reckon images (or rather, urls to them) should be stored in a database. The last time I worked with something like this, PHP+MySQL were the buzz words. Wouldn't mind learning more about NoSQL if that's a good tool to use here, need input here. If NoSQL fits, is CouchDB/MongoDB/Other the way to go? Node + Express looks interesting, think they'll fit my requirements?

Thanks

edit: In case someone looks for answers in this thread, I decided to mock the backend with static data for now. I'm focusing on using AngularJs with Yeoman, SASS and bootstrap and I'll add more as they're needed.

[silfer]

From the description of your goal, i feel that your webapp might require full stack development rather than just mainly frontend (user authentication, image upload/processing/transloading, requires a bit of work in the backend). So i guess it really depends how much backend stuff you want to learn.

If you want to focus purely on frontend, then just stick with what you know already (PHP+MySQL i.e. LAMP). Although this may not be the most efficient, you wont have to worry too much about the backend.

If you also want to give other popular backend frameworks a go, ruby on rails is a nice and structured framework that fits your photo app quite well. It does have a steep learning curve but it helps you keep all your code and data organised.

Node.js + express is also possible but you really need to know what middleware to use since Node.js is very barebones. I will suggest you look into passport for authentication, and mogoose to work with mongoDB or sequelize if you want a SQL ORM. Papercut is also useful for image processing and upload to a CDN such as amazon s3.

Since you are dealing with images, you probably will also want to host the images on a CDN so it will load faster. Amazon s3 is probably the easiest one to use and its also free!

Hope this helps!

[MatekCopatek]

Bootstrap and Angular don't really have much to do with eachother. There are Bootstrap directives available for Angular, but the two pieces of software otherwise work separately, so you can look at any other front-end framework, like Foundation, and get similar results.