One bit of advice, don't go for React/Angular/front-end unless you actually need to or you actually want to. Whatever web framework you're using (probably some

One bit of advice, don't go for React/Angular/front-end unless you actually need to or you actually want to. Whatever web framework you're using (probably some variation of Spring if you're using Java) should have built in templating which should be more than sufficient to build an MVP/Proof of concept imageboard. I doubt 4chan is running any kind of SPA either. Then if your project is successful or you want to stick with it, you can build your frontend javascript app as a phase 2. In most webframeworks you'll do largely the same query/controller work to get the data for both a JSON API and a templated web page. The API will just map that data to JSON while the templated page will map the values into an HTML response.