Adding an AI Chat Feature to a Java App: A Reference Implementation
· 6 min read
The request usually lands vague: leadership wants AI in the app. A day of back-and-forth resolves it into something concrete, a chat feature where users can ask questions and get streaming, well-formatted answers grounded in the app's own domain.
What most tutorials skip is what the feature looks like end to end: the streaming UI, the cancel behavior, the prompt shape, the error surface, and how it all hangs together in a real Java app. This post uses ghost:ai, a small open-source reference project in the built-with-webforJ collection, as the running example. Every code snippet is real code from that project.
