Ask HN: Advice on Building a Web App/SaaS.

[WebAppBuilder]

Hey, fellow hackers, I'm a CS grad with a decent amount of programming knowledge and experience with Java/Python/PHP/JS and a few DBs - SQL and a few NoSQL stores.

I want to build a service which allows for user sign up (form submission / CGI-stuff), data collection + storage + (DB stuff - NoSQL stores or MySQL) and displaying that data for each user (with some data viz). I've some decent background in UX/UI design, and have a clear idea of how I want the front-end to be in HTML5+JS.

I've been looking at various MVC frameworks in Java to build something like this, but I've no experience building on them - Spring, Play, etc. And probably Hibernate for ORM. I do plan on having a REST-based API so that I can have other clients in the future.

How should I architect it, and where do I begin? What would I need to educate myself on before embarking down this path. I seek your valuable advice HNers. Thanks in Anticipation.

[t-crayford]

Look at dropwizard.codahale.com, it's probably closer to what you want eventually.

[WebAppBuilder → t-crayford]

Thanks for the suggestion, seems interesting. Any examples which have used Dropwizard, Tom?

Is the site itself inclusive on what I'd need to know if I plan on using DropWizard? Who would be an ideal candidate to use DW, and how do I educate myself enough to be able to use this effectively and if possible contribute back to the project itself.