Real-time notifications are a critical feature for many modern applications, enhancing user engagement and improving responsiveness. Spring Boot, with its powerful ecosystem, makes implementing real-time notifications straightforward and efficient.

In this blog, we’ll explore how to build a real-time notification system using Spring Boot and WebSocket.

What Are Real-Time Notifications?

Real-time notifications allow applications to push updates to users instantly. This eliminates the need for users to refresh the page or make repeated requests to check for updates.

Typical use cases include:

• Chat applications (e.g., Slack, WhatsApp)
• Stock market updates
• Alerts in dashboard systems

Step-by-Step Implementation

1. Set Up a Spring Boot Application

Start by creating a Spring Boot application with the following dependencies:

• Spring Web
• WebSocket
• Spring Boot DevTools (optional for hot-reloading)

Add the dependencies to your pom.xml (for Maven):

<dependencies>    <dependency>        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>    </dependency>    <dependency>        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-websocket</artifactId>    </dependency></dependencies>

2. Configure WebSocket

Create a WebSocket configuration class to establish the connection.

import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;import org.springframework.web.socket.config.annotation.EnableWebSocket;import org.springframework.web.socket.config.annotation.WebSocketConfigurer;import org.springframework.web.socket.config.annotation.WebSocketHandlerRegistry;@Configuration@EnableWebSocketpublic class WebSocketConfig implements WebSocketConfigurer {    @Override    public void registerWebSocketHandlers(WebSocketHandlerRegistry…