Hi Warren,
Welcome to Wappler and our great community! Here you can find all the resources you need to get started quickly and also any expert advise from the Wappler experts.
The best way to get started is to explore all Wappler docs learning resources.
You can find a good overview of those at:
As for running NodeJS - it has its own server, so very easy for local development. And for the deploy you usually use docker.
You can also make PHP projects and connect indeed to MSSQL as you wish.