WebSockets are a powerful tool for building real-time applications, such as chat applications. In this post, we'll show you how to build a chat application using Spring Boot and WebSockets.
To get started, you'll need to create a new Spring Boot project. You can do this using the Spring Initializr. Make sure to select the Web and WebSocket dependencies.
Once you have your project set up, you'll need to add the following dependency to your pom.xml
:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-websocket</artifactId>
</dependency>
Next, you'll need to configure WebSockets in your application.properties
file:
server.port=8080
spring.websocket.server.port=8081
spring.websocket.server.path=/ws
Now that you have your project set up, you can start building the WebSocket endpoint. Create a new class called ChatEndpoint
and annotate it with @ServerEndpoint
. This annotation will tell Spring that this class is a WebSocket endpoint.
@ServerEndpoint("/ws")
public class ChatEndpoint {
}
The next step is to add methods for sending and receiving messages. The @OnMessage
annotation will be used to mark a method as a message handler. This method will be called every time a message is received on the WebSocket endpoint.
@OnMessage
public void handleMessage(String message, Session session) {
// do something with the message
}
To send a message, you can use the Session.getBasicRemote().sendText(message)
method.
@OnMessage
public void handleMessage(String message, Session session) {
session.getBasicRemote().sendText("Echo: " + message);
}
You can test your chat application using the WebSocket.org Echo Test. Enter your WebSocket endpoint (ws://localhost:8081/ws) and start sending messages. You should see the messages you send echoed back to you.
In this post, we've shown you how to build a chat application using Spring Boot and WebSockets. WebSockets are a powerful tool for building real-time applications.