CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaspringspring-mvcwebwebsocket
funny-shmunny
funny-shmunny

Reputation: 97

Messaging between users in Spring MVC app

I make the web-application using Spring MVC and there is a posibility of users to send messages to each other. How can I realize such feature: when the user is on his messages page and he gets the message from someone else, this message adds to his messages list without refreshing the page. Some kind of push notifications, but I can't come up with the right idea, how to realize it.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1712

Answers (1)

incomplete-co.de
incomplete-co.de

Reputation: 2137

there's two pieces to consider in this; the 'messaging' framework, and the client-side notification.

typically, the 'messaging' framework would be designed/constructed to be independant of the view layer (Spring MVC piece) and might consist of either a reliable messaging platform (JMS, AMQP, etc.) or some service that allows events to be pushed into the framework. this allows for users to be 'connected' to a JVM instance independant of each other (say a clustered Tomcat environment or some such).

a simpler - old school solution to this was to use a shared database and write/read messages to a shared table with a user identifier; something like from=userA,to=userB,message=... the you could use a polling mechanism to retrieve the messages.

on the client-side, there are a number of patterns including long polling, ajax, websockets etc. that are intended to solve this design question. to marry into the polling solution, an AJAX timed poller (coupled with event) would allow you to continually update a section of your page by requesting from a service "do i (userB) have any new messages?"

the polling solution is "old school" and there are many more options than this. have a dig on topics such as websockets that were developed with this exact challenge in mind. (and have a look at Tomcat8's websocket support too)

Upvotes: 1

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