A forum depends very heavily on the database structure. You want to nail that first. You don't need Java for that.
Posts and replies
Posts with parents and children
Forums
Subforums
Users
Permissions
Achievements
Ratings
(temporarily) banning on username/ip
Logging
Maintenance mode
Pruning
The list goes on and on.
Create a backend that will pull the data. EJB's that use plain old DAO's, Hibernate, any other ORM, or just plain JPA.
A webservice that serves it to the frontend (Possibly usng JSON for your asynchronous client).
A HTML client using React, Ember2, or Angular2.
SASS for creating CSS
This will keep you busy for a day or two