For our web application's backend, we have decided to create our server using Node.js and npm as our package manager, as this allows us to utilize a developer's skills and knowledge in JS for both the frontend and backend. ExpressJS provides us an easy to learn framework that saves us effort, time and improves productivity in creating our server, while affording us room to add complexity. Passport will be used to implement Oauth2.0 authentication for our web application, allowing our users to sign in with their existing accounts (no one wants to create a remember the password for yet another account). Mongoose will be used to make calls to our backend, this framework will help make these calls more accessible and organized. We have decided to use Redis on our server for any caching we need. This will greatly speed up retrieval times and reduce calls to external sources for any data that could instead be cached on our server. Lastly, we will use Jest as our unit testing framework for our backend as it is very popular and has support for Node.js . Furthermore, this is the same testing framework we will be using for our frontend, thus allowing use quickly learn and implement testing in both frontend and backend.

We have decided to use Heroku as our hosting platform for our server. Heroku provides clear documentation and a quick and simple process to host Node.js applications with their service, along with great support with our version control Git. Furthermore, Heroku also provides a free tier, which allows us to deploy and test our web application from the beginning of development.

MongoDB is our chosen database as a NoSQL database will give us flexibility in storing different types of data and room for scaling our product. We have decided to use MongoDB Atlas to host our database. As they provide a quick and simple start up along with a free tier to host database. Thus, allowing us to rapidly test our server's uses with the database.