Instead of trying to do it all at once you might want to take it in chunks.

I would start on the front end and

I would start with looking into Bootstrap and jquery. And look at using PHP to deliver the webservice data to jquery. http://tutorialzine.com/2015/01/shoutbox-php-jquery/

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I would also google some MVC PHP tutorals to get some idea of how MVC works since alot of modern frameworks are modeled after it.

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next pick a javascript framework to make a SPA here's some tutorials(middle of the page) on using angularjs with php: http://www.angularcode.com/

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now your ready to swap out php for another server technology. nodejs, RoR, whatever.

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