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Overview

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This step-by-step tutorial guides you through the process of building a customer management app using webforJ and Spring Boot. It teaches you how to create a modern, user-friendly interface for viewing, adding, and editing customer data.

Each step introduces new concepts and results in a runnable Spring Boot app (JAR). You can launch your app locally using Maven and interact with it in a web browser. With this setup, you get a fast development cycle with frontend bundling and a production-ready deployment model, using Spring Boot’s embedded server.

No prior Spring Boot or webforJ experience is needed, but you should have a basic understanding of Java and Maven to get the most out of this tutorial. This tutorial will cover Spring concepts as they come up, but those interested in an in-depth understanding of Spring can go to Spring's main documentation and Spring's documentation about Spring Boot.

Tutorial concepts​

The first part of the tutorial is dedicated to project setup to prepare your Spring Boot + webforJ environment. Then, the following steps introduce new features and advance your project. By following along, you’ll gain a clear understanding of how an app evolves as you implement features.

Each step has a corresponding runnable app available on GitHub:

StepDocumentationGitHub
1Creating a Basic AppStep 1 app
2Working with DataStep 2 app
3Routing and CompositesStep 3 app
4Observers and Route ParametersStep 4 app
5Validating and Binding DataStep 5 app
6Integrating an App LayoutStep 6 app

Prerequisites​

You should have the following tools/resources on your development machine:

  • Java 21 or 25
  • Maven
  • A Java IDE
  • Git (recommended but not required)
webforJ prerequisites

Check the prerequisites article for a more detailed overview of the required tools for your development environment.