StudyConnect (StudySync) StudyConnect is a full-stack, cloud-native platform designed to help university students collaborate by creating and joining study groups. Built with Spring Boot 3 and React 19, the application is fully deployed on AWS with a focus on security and scalability.
🚀 Live Demo: Frontend | 🔑 Backend API
🌟 Key Features User Authentication: Secure signup and login system using JWT (JSON Web Tokens) for stateless session management.
Study Group Management: Users can create, browse, and join study groups filtered by academic subjects.
Personal Dashboard: Real-time stats showing active groups and upcoming sessions.
Secure API Design: Role-based access control (RBAC) ensuring users can only manage their own created groups.
Cloud-Native Architecture: Optimized for production with cross-origin security (CORS) and content delivery networks (CDN).
🛠️ Tech Stack Backend Framework: Java 17, Spring Boot 3.5
Security: Spring Security 6 with JWT
Database: PostgreSQL via AWS RDS
ORM: Spring Data JPA (Hibernate)
Mappers: MapStruct and Lombok for clean DTO patterns
Frontend Library: React 19 (Vite)
Styling: Tailwind CSS
Icons: Lucide React
Routing: React Router DOM
Cloud & DevOps (AWS) Frontend Hosting: Amazon S3 + CloudFront (HTTPS)
API Hosting: AWS Elastic Beanstalk (Java Environment)
API Gateway: CloudFront for secure backend proxying and CORS management
Database: Amazon RDS (PostgreSQL)
📐 Architecture & Security Highlights One of the major challenges during development was resolving Mixed Content errors and CORS preflight (OPTIONS) failures.
Dual-CloudFront Strategy: To support HTTPS across the entire stack without a custom domain, a second CloudFront distribution was configured as a reverse proxy for the Elastic Beanstalk backend.
CORS Handshake: Implemented a custom CorsConfigurationSource to handle browser-mandated preflight requests, explicitly allowing Authorization and Content-Type headers for secure cross-site requests.
🚦 Getting Started Prerequisites Java 17+
Node.js 18+
PostgreSQL
Local Setup Clone the Repo:
Bash
git clone https://github.com/sajad42/StudyConnect.git Backend Setup:
Update application.yml with your local database credentials.
Run ./mvnw spring-boot:run.
Frontend Setup:
Navigate to /Frontend/StudyConnect.
Run npm install and npm run dev.
📧 Contact Sajad - - sajad.alizada2014@gmai.com