Background: At work I was tasked with developing a new demo web client to replace our Windows Form application in the future. Our back-end is developed in Java and works stateless as REST services. The demo client should be based on Angular as we want to try out some things first. Both I and other developers already have expertise there. Whereby other web future oriented frameworks are also welcome.
Problem: The migration to a new client is no problem and no challenge. However, there are one or two problems and challenges. We have a couple of functions that require a lot of processing power but these functions are executed on the client side. In the future this should no longer be the case but happen in the backend. So far so good BUT these algorithms start with various start parameters and execute certain logic. In the course via. Dialogs various new input parameters are needed or information messages are displayed. So the program or these function(s) wait for the user input before continuing. (These do not run in their own thread btw). The whole thing should now be outsourced to the backend. Here the question arises how something like this could be implemented. Since our current architecture does not allow such a thing (REST).
We have already briefly looked at WebSockets as this seems to be the way-to-go to realize something like this. Just a fixed connection between client and server to communicate and not as currently stateless within closed requests and responses.
Is this even possible? We don't really know where to start right now, because every online example for WebSockets implementation (in Java) do not really seem to fit our needs.
So basically we need something like this:
Any help, feedback and ideas are welcome.
Thanks
WebSockets examples, is this even the right technology for this