How can i create a mobile application server?

What collection of web technologies (both on the server and on the client side) would you use to create a 10k lines to 20k lines ajax web application?

• Here's what I would use: On the client side something like: jQuery, Twitter Bootstrap and angular.js. On the server side, Apache, MySQL, PHP and codeigniter. But I have not had the time to check what other great technologies have been made available during the last couple of years or so. I really would appreciate if you could point me at new ways of developing ajax web apps. I wonder what people would use today, if they were to start a new project from scratch. I am specially interested in technologies that could easily help integrate client and server in new ways, like automatic server method invocation when a certain variable changes on the client and vice-versa - but I am not even sure this is how people do this, these days. What I really would like to know is what is the modern, possibly best, easy approach to writing ajax web applications. Maybe you can point me to places where I can get up to date with modern techniques.

• Answer:

  Node.js is an excellent choice for realtime applications. It allows you to enjoy the benefits of javascript on the server side and the client side. This is especially nice if you're looking to share code between the two without having to rewrite everything in two languages. Tied together with a library like socket.io, you can make a pretty powerful application. Socket allows you to easily create a connection between the server and the browser by using WebSockets, Flash, AJAX polling etc, depending on what's available on the user's browser. These are obviously just two of many, but they're a great choice for any realtime/AJAX web application. Also, as mentioned, lines of code is irrelevant here. These technologies (and any others) will work no matter how many lines of code you have. It's more important to have the ability to design the architecture of your code well than it is to pick a system that will attempt to handle that for you.