We're off to a good start by building the web layer of our social media platform. We used the Spring Initializr to create a bare bones Reactive Spring application with Gradle support. Then we explored the basics of reactive programming by creating a reactive image handling service and wrapping it with a reactive web layer. And we drafted a Thymeleaf template to show thumbnails, allow deleting of images and uploading of new images.

In the next chapter, we will see how to build a data layer and make it reactive as well.