Great to hear you're rolling up your sleeves and going to give developing it yourself a go.
I taught myself to program using PHP, then moved to Rails, and now do mostly Javascript and Node work.
There are a few things to consider. Number one, you're absolutely going to need a front-end, which means you're going to need to learn javascript, and probably use a framework like backbone, angular, or ember. Personally, I think knockout may be the easiest of all of these to 'pick-up', but none of them (I don't think) are going to be easy as a beginner.
At first, I'd suggest your back-end can wait. You can use parse or firebase or one of the other back-end as a service providers to manage your data. Just make sure you're able to get it back later.
Now, if you're adamant about doing the server-side stuff, I'd say go with Ruby-on-Rails, which is a framework for making it easier to build and manage an application written in Ruby. The framework does a lot of stuff for you, and you can host it on heroku fairly easily.
A few good things about Rails (I haven't used other frameworks like Django (Python) or Larvel (PHP)), is that it forces you to have a program structured in such a way that if you bring in another developer at a later date, they should be able to find their way around your code base fairly easily. That's what got me to make the switch, I was doing a contract I knew I wouldn't be working on long-term, and new that a rails app would be easy for somebody else to step in on.
Thanks so much for your feedback. I think with this project I'm going to look at outsourcing the development, but roll up my sleeves and learn as much as I can at the same time.
Currently I know a bit of HTML and CSS and I'm looking to 'master' both of those and then pick a language to try learning. Though after reading your reply, I feel I need to learn Javascript too.
Really appreciate your thoughts on Ruby and thanks again for taking the time to reply.
That's a good point jeopour. A framework can also make things more complicated, but they are good for learning how to structure your programs. What would you recommend for learning structure.
There are a lot of excellent resources online such as blog posts or open source projects on github, but the way I learnt was by reading a couple books people had recommended me. I also took patterns commonly found on the server side of things and implemented in a way relevant to my client side code.
I taught myself to program using PHP, then moved to Rails, and now do mostly Javascript and Node work.
There are a few things to consider. Number one, you're absolutely going to need a front-end, which means you're going to need to learn javascript, and probably use a framework like backbone, angular, or ember. Personally, I think knockout may be the easiest of all of these to 'pick-up', but none of them (I don't think) are going to be easy as a beginner.
At first, I'd suggest your back-end can wait. You can use parse or firebase or one of the other back-end as a service providers to manage your data. Just make sure you're able to get it back later.
Now, if you're adamant about doing the server-side stuff, I'd say go with Ruby-on-Rails, which is a framework for making it easier to build and manage an application written in Ruby. The framework does a lot of stuff for you, and you can host it on heroku fairly easily.
A few good things about Rails (I haven't used other frameworks like Django (Python) or Larvel (PHP)), is that it forces you to have a program structured in such a way that if you bring in another developer at a later date, they should be able to find their way around your code base fairly easily. That's what got me to make the switch, I was doing a contract I knew I wouldn't be working on long-term, and new that a rails app would be easy for somebody else to step in on.