A question for Web developers:
I'm planing to start working on a web part of my project. Important part is that it's supposed to be working with MongoDB. The idea is to build a small digital library, so the main functionalities should be user registering, his login, querying database for books, showing list of results and viewing pdf files up to 200MB size.

Since I have almost no experience with web technologies, I would like to hear your advices and opinions on the technologies/languages I should use and learn. Should I go with JavaScript? Php? Something third?

Please note that this is a school project on which I'm working after my job, and not something to be deployed to customers.

Thank you

You're definitely going to want to learn JavaScript for the front-end. For the back-end, you have more choice. You can do it in Node.js and use JavaScript for both the front and back, which is pretty nice, especially if you're new to everything, but it's up to you.

The back-end could actually be pretty thin, since you are talking to a NoSQL database, you can communicate with Mongo directly from the client if you wanted to keep it really simple. Or you could go through an API endpoint and talk to the database from the server to make things a little more robust and scaleable.

But start with JavaScript. MongoDB views are written in JavaScript too I believe so you're gonna need JavaScript one way or the other, and besides, every web developer needs to know JavaScript. It's not really optional. 😉

@devios1
Yeah, MongoDB actually uses JavaScript shell for commands :).
Using JavaScript for both front and back sounds really good, and making it not too complicated would be the best option since I don't have much time to do all that in a completely new language.

Thanks for the info, I'll definitely look into this :)

I have one more question though: should I use any framework? I would maybe prefer doing it without framework, but is that the right move?

@nikola1402 My personal 2 cents is learn JavaScript without any frameworks (with the exception of maybe a little jQuery here and there if you need it). jQuery is really more of a toolkit than a framework anyway.

But I would definitely steer clear of the big frameworks like React and Angular until you have a solid understanding of the core language. They are more advanced and harder to learn because they involve more specialized higher-level concepts. They also force you to do things in a certain way, which imo isn't the best way to learn how to code.

@devios1 That settles it then. Thanks a lot, you've been very helpful :)