Not sure which technology to use

[doconline]

I have an idea for a website which I have started here - www.letsgetlunch.co.uk. The front end if based on Google Maps with the usual suspects of HTML and jQuery, with PHP / MySQL as the backend. I am not sure if this is the best way for the site moving forward.

The site is just a list of food places within close proximity of your location (currently this is hard coded as St Pauls London, but will use GeoLocation). You will be able to filter the locations by what they sell. In the future I may add reviews to the site and there will be an extended description for the location in a pop-up / new tab. In addition to the site, in the future I would like to convert it to an app, potentially with PhoneGap?

I would like to know if these technologies are the best choice for the site, or if I should be looking at Node/Mongo or something else? Any ideas / suggestions gratefully received.

If you're going to be coding all this yourself, then I'd suggest getting it off the ground with what you know. Learning other technologies can take a considerable amount of time. Learning it sufficiently in order to create secure and robust solutions may take even longer again. "Apping it" could be done via PG or you could do some native programming - again a considerable investment in time and effort, if you're not familiar with languages like ObjC or Java.

I hope I'm not putting you off researching other techs - that's not what I'm saying at all - just that if you're the sole programmer and you need to get this off the ground quickly, you may be better serving this off PHP/MySQL and using front-end media queries to support mobile view. Once up and going, you can invest time in developing a other techs.

Look at the PG documentation and see what techs can be used "out of the box".

I'm sure other contributors here will have their own views, possibly even contradicting me and saying "Get it right from the start" or "Start as you mean to go on". This is an equally valid POV, but it does depend on the urgency of the project.

[doconline]

Thanks for yur reply. I am happy to use this as a learning experience for new technologies if necessary, not really bothered how long this takes as it is a personal project rather than for a client. I am interested in learning the MEAN stack, but not sure if this project would be suitable?

mean.io has a great ready-built fullstack. I haven't used it, although I've fiddled about with Node and Mongo. Haven't used Angular, so I can't comment on that, but it looks like a pretty cool setup. I'd certainly give it a whirl if you've got the time. I may even give it a go myself (so thanks for the nudge!). Have a look here:

http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-get-MEAN-stack-app-to-fit-into-Cordova-Phonegap

[cereal]

Just an add: maybe this is something you don't need at this stage, but regarding the database consider also PostgreSQL which has a really great support for geocoding & co.: http://postgis.net/

[doconline]

Thanks, I will certainly check those out. The market seems to moving towards full stack JavaScript for projects, particularly here in the UK, so I will look at mean.io.

Let me know how you got on. I've spent 3 hours trying to get mean.io to play nice. Heh heh, all those dependencies make me wanna puke. I didn't realise that you had to install everything manually - node, mongodb, grunt, gulp, bower, python, VS!, git, mongoose, mean itself. npm should have managed it - but it didn't. What a palaver. Give me XAMPP any day! Gonna purge everything now as it's polluted my system with hanging fruit. Oh well, one for when I have a few clear days maybe.