I am a newbie coder. I have been working with wordpress, tweaking its html, css and javascript, for more than 5 years now. But never got to hardcore coding these from scratch.

I am now working on a more ambitious (as per my standards :D) project . I have a data heavy and proprietary json file that I created from multiple sources, having more than 10,000 entries. I want to create a custom search in my wordpress, which queries this json file, performs some complex javascript logic, and returns a prioritised subset of the json, which gets displayed in the search results.

I am able to get the logic running, but want to keep both the proprietary json and the logic, protected. I realise that I might need to move this to a backend server, but have never worked with server side coding before.

So, my question is this:

1. Is it possible to keep the json and my js file in my wordpress directory and yet keep it hidden from the browser?
2. I think the answer is no to the above question. If so, what is my best bet to achieve this? I have been researching this for more than a week now, but I am getting so confused. I am planning to learn node.js to handle my logic and use a mySQL database to store the json as a database and use the data. I just wanted to confirm whether this approach is going to solve the problem, and if there is a better and easier way to get this done.

This is my first question in here. Please excuse any huge blunders. Thanks.