[ry_ry]

Super simple answer, so apologies if it sounds condescending or I've glossed over aspects entirely.

Libs like vue & react are essentially ui renderers, they create the html representation of app state, and handle all the DOM event binding and whatnot for you.

You will likely have some kind of client state management to take care of telling your ui to update, but essentially you will push json into that 'store' and that will then be used by your framework of choice to populate the page with content.

How that json gets there is largely upto you, and will be influenced by what you use to manage state, however you will need to handle getting data from the db server-side. Php or rails are popular, with reams of great (and some not so great) resources out there, but realistically you could use whatever you wanted.

Node.js is nice and could be useful if you want to focus on 1 language initially.

[JungleGymSam]

It wasn't condescending at all. On the contrary.

Partly I was tripped up because I have used Meteor and they handle everything for you. Before that I was using PHP and making SQL queries to MySQL directly.

In both of those cases I was able to get directly at the database. What you're saying is that I need a middle-tier that acts as the layer above the database but below the client (obviously.)

You mentioned Node.js. I know what that is and I know it's not a database. So it needs to connect to a database and then pass off data to the client. This is the piece of the puzzle I'm missing in my mental visualization.

I've learned that Laravel works well with Vue so I'll start there.

Thanks!