[[websocket-stomp-handle-broker-relay]]
= External Broker

The simple broker is great for getting started but supports only a subset of
STOMP commands (it does not support acks, receipts, and some other features),
relies on a simple message-sending loop, and is not suitable for clustering.
As an alternative, you can upgrade your applications to use a full-featured
message broker.

See the STOMP documentation for your message broker of choice (such as
https://www.rabbitmq.com/stomp.html[RabbitMQ],
https://activemq.apache.org/stomp.html[ActiveMQ], and others), install the broker,
and run it with STOMP support enabled. Then you can enable the STOMP broker relay
(instead of the simple broker) in the Spring configuration.

The following example configuration enables a full-featured broker:

include-code::./WebSocketConfiguration[tag=snippet,indent=0]

The STOMP broker relay in the preceding configuration is a Spring
{spring-framework-api}/messaging/MessageHandler.html[`MessageHandler`]
that handles messages by forwarding them to an external message broker.
To do so, it establishes TCP connections to the broker, forwards all messages to it,
and then forwards all messages received from the broker to clients through their
WebSocket sessions. Essentially, it acts as a "`relay`" that forwards messages
in both directions.

NOTE: Add `io.projectreactor.netty:reactor-netty` and `io.netty:netty-all`
dependencies to your project for TCP connection management.

Furthermore, application components (such as HTTP request handling methods,
business services, and others) can also send messages to the broker relay, as described
in xref:web/websocket/stomp/handle-send.adoc[Sending Messages], to broadcast messages to subscribed WebSocket clients.

In effect, the broker relay enables robust and scalable message broadcasting.
