Building real-time applications means balancing user responsiveness with heavy backend processing. A proven solution is to decouple heavy workloads using events and asynchronous processing. In this approach, a Spring Boot application quickly publishes events to Kafka instead of processing requests inline. Then Kafka consumers (with AI/ML logic) handle the data in the background, and the results are pushed to clients in real time via WebSockets. This article highlights three key patterns enabling this architecture:
- Event Production with Spring Boot and Kafka
- AI-Driven Processing in Kafka Consumers
- Real-Time WebSocket Delivery to the Frontend
Event Production with Spring Boot and Kafka
The first step is capturing an event and publishing it to Kafka. By offloading work to Kafka the application can respond immediately to the user without waiting for processing. Spring Boot’s integration with Apache Kafka provides a KafkaTemplate to send messages to topics.