Introduction
In this article, we will be covering the steps to create a Java WebSocket server, powered by Spring Boot, that communicates with Java clients and supports load balancing across multiple instances. We’ll start by describing a use case scenario, analyzing the requirements, and then we’ll proceed to choose the technology stack that suits the case. We’ll implement the code, and finally test the application to get some performance and durability benchmarks.
Use Case: A Smart Home
The first thought we had when writing this, was to go with the classic demonstration of WebSockets usage that is the chat application. But if you were to search the internet about WebSocket examples, 99% of them are about chat apps. So we needed to come up with another idea, one that would be more fascinating and relevant to today’s technology, and would cover both point-to-point communication, as well as one-to-many broadcasting. And that is a smart home device network.