Web App Challenge – What Stack to use

As I start to line up for the web app challenge, the first thing I wanted to settle on was the ‘stack’ to use to build the app (I don’t have an idea of what to build yet) but I do know how

I’m going to build it and what tools. This post goes through the thinking behind the choice and hopefully you can pick up and start with a similar stack for your own project (if you build one).

What is a stack?

It’s the tools you use to build your app. It’s important to choose the right tools to get started. So what have I chosen. Do you agree? Given the app I’ll be building with be a paid app so it will need user accounts and locked down pages if a subscription is not active.

Payment provider. This was a relatively easy choice. I’m going with Stripe for the payment side of the app. I did briefly consider braintree but due to a number of different reasons I ended up going with Stripe (it’s cooler, and I can also hook it up to Baremetrics in the future).

App Framework. This is where it gets interesting for me. I’ve built some apps with node.js and MEAN.io however time has moved on and I’ve heard good things about the Meteor platform. So I’m going to roll with that for the App structure. But what does this mean?

• It’s javascript based through and actually is based on node.js
• The database is JSON (i.e. MongoDB) which is nice to work with

Front End Styles. This one is obvious, I’ll be using Bootstrap to scaffold and style the app. This will come in later as I settle on what the app should actually do.

Finally, there’s the hosting side of the decision. More than likely I’ll run this app on Amazon AWS, it’s generally cheaper than Heroku.  It’ll be developed on a localhost for the chunk of the work 🙂

So there it is. The choices I made for the App build framework.