Prerequisites

In the upcoming lessons we’ll be focused on building an application rather than discussing the theory in detail, so a foundational knowledge will help you to get the very most out of this project.

To follow along and build the blog platform app you’ll need a practical knowledge of Java, Maven, Docker and PostgreSQL.

By “practical knowledge” I mean that I won’t be explaining how technologies work in this project, instead I’ll assume you’re already comfortable with them so we can focus on building our project.

For Spring Boot, you should be comfortable with the basic concepts.

Where this project becomes more challenging is that we’ll be using Spring Security and JSON Web Tokens, or JWTs. So a basic knowledge of Spring Security and how JWTs work would be very beneficial, although not strictly needed, as once our security is configured we’ll not need to revisit it.

A special note about our project’s React frontend. Of course, this project is focused on building a Spring Boot application, however I do offer the same React frontend I use.

We’ll be using the Node Package Manager (npm) to install the dependencies for the frontend, so although you don’t need to know how Node works, or how to build a React application, it would be beneficial to know what Node is and what is means to use npm. Otherwise, a quick read of the Node website should be enough to understand this.

In the next lesson we’ll look to set up our development environment.

Summary

• We will be focused on building rather than deep-diving theory in this project
• You’ll need a basic knowledge of Java, Maven, PostgreSQL & Spring Boot to follow along effectively
• Knowledge of Spring Security & JWTs would be beneficial
• I offer a React frontend to help you follow along, though we won’t code it in this project.
• We’ll be using npm to run the React frontend