spring boot - What is the difference between @EnableWebSocket and @EnableWebSocketMessageBroker

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I want to enable sockets in a Spring application and in the documentation came up 2 ways of using them, plain and with STOMP enabled.

I understand that the later is backed up by a message broker but did not find any good explanation of this feature.

So, my question would be, what does Spring bring in the back scenes when @EnableWebSocketMessageBroker is used, compared to @EnableWebSocket ?

You already stated the differences yourself. The


    @EnableWebSocket

enables plain websockets, if you want to use stomp you need a broker and need to the


    @EnableWebSocketMessageBroker

to indicate this. – M. Deinum Jul 23, 2018 at 8:51 Thanks Deinum for the quick comment. I was wondering if there is any documentation that describes this better. Would an application work as-is if the EnableWebSocket is switched to EnableWebSocketMessageBroker ? Put it other way, I wanted to read about this in more depth and did not find articles other than tutorials. – Victor Jul 24, 2018 at 7:39

From what I have read so far, the difference consists in the fact that the later ( @EnableWebSocketMessageBroker ) offers a better handling for the exchanged messages. In order to keep them somehow in controll, a very good approach is to use a message broker:

easy to broadcast to intersted parts. Otherwise you have to keep trace of session and to iterate through them in order to send a message to each client who is interested

assuring the message got to the client. Out of the box, a message broker offers acknowledgement flags that will be interchanged between client and server in order to assure the message transmission and interception

Note : the annotation @EnableWebSocketMessageBroker does not by default add an underlying full-featured Broker, but a "Simple one". The simple version:

supports subset of STOMP: SUBSCRIBE, UNSUBSCRIBE, MESSAGE

no acks, receipts, transactions

simple message sending loop

not suitable for clustering

A full-featured one will add more functionalities, that can be found on its presentation documentation. (read more in http://rstoyanchev.github.io/s2gx2013-websocket-browser-apps-with-spring )

Other nice to read reference: Message queues vs sockets , The MessageBroker WebSocket Subprotocol

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