I am trying to learn and build an app that can integrate mobile chat. Mostly, I’m wondering what languages/design patterns/technologies I should learn so that I can fluently build and fully understand the constructs of a mobile chat back end. I have considered using Couchbase lite as a chat back end but read that this might be slow and will also cause tombstones to be left behind. I don’t have any issues reading a bunch of thick texts books on the topic. The real issue is I don’t know where to start my learning. Should I learn C# WCF, PHP, XMPP, Socket.IO, PubNub, Node.JS, HTML, GCM, REST, etc… Ideally I would like the back end server to be on Azure or Amazon Web Services. Also I’d like the technologies/languages to be as cost effective as possible and as secure as possible.
If anyone could point me in the right direction I would greatly appreciate it.