About the project

This tutorial will walk you through building a to-do list application. A to-do list is a very common first project because it teaches the basics of building a web-based application. Building and maintaining a web service is one of the most common tasks in software engineering. A to-do list has all of the basic operations you would find in a web service, namely reading and writing data. These operations are so common that there is a term for this type of service: CRUD (short for create, read, update, delete). Your to-do list will be able to perform all four of these actions.

Prerequisites

This tutorial uses the Spring boot framework with Java. This tutorial is built for those who have some experience in Java. You should have familiarity with working with objects. You should know what a class is and how to create one. You should also have some familiarity with a Java IDE (Eclipse or IntelliJ). These prerequisites match the knowledge that you would get from the first few weeks of an introductory Java course. Knowledge of Spring Boot, databases, and web services is not required, as we will be going over how to use those technologies.

Structure of the project

This project will walk you through creating a Spring Boot web service for a to-do list. You will use Spring Boot to create an RESTful API that can respond to HTTP requests. Spring boot will connect to MongoDB to store data long-term. When your service receives a request for a given URL, your code will make a call to MongoDB to retrieve or write data. It will then create an object to return to the user and Spring Boot will automatically convert the object into an HTTP response.

After the API is complete, you will create a frontend website that calls those APIs. It will use the data returned by the API to display data to the user in the browser. This way, anyone can interact with the data in the database without having to write their own code.

Learn more

To learn more about the structure of a web application, check out some resources by the Odin Project:

• Introduction to web development https://www.theodinproject.com/lessons/foundations-introduction-to-web-development

• What is a backend https://www.theodinproject.com/lessons/foundations-introduction-to-the-back-end