SkyWatch: Real-Time C4ISR Surveillance Dashboard

SkyWatch is a full-stack, event-driven aircraft surveillance dashboard designed to mirror the architecture of modern defense and aerospace C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) systems.

It ingests live ADS-B telemetry from the OpenSky Network, processes the data stream through an Apache Kafka pipeline, caches live states for ultra-low latency, persists historical tracks, and pushes updates to a React client via WebSockets.

[OpenSky REST API] 
       │ (Polling every 10s)
       ▼
 [Spring Boot Producer] ───> (Raw JSON) ───> [Apache Kafka Broker]
                                                     │
                                                     ▼
                                           [Spring Boot Consumer]
                                           (Data Enrichment & Geofencing)
                                                     │
                             ┌───────────────────────┴───────────────────────┐
                             ▼                                               ▼
             [ Redis (Live State Cache) ]                   [ PostgreSQL (Historical DB) ]
                             │                                               │
                             ▼                                               ▼
             [Spring Boot STOMP Broadcaster]                 [Spring Boot REST Controller]
                             │                                               │
                             ▼ (WebSockets /topic/flights)                   ▼ (HTTP GET /api/flights/history)
                             └───────────────────────┬───────────────────────┘
                                                     ▼
                                        [ React 18 + Leaflet UI ]

• Real-Time Data Streaming: Bi-directional STOMP WebSocket integration pushes live telemetry to the browser without client-side polling.
• Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT):
  • Draw dynamic bounding boxes (geofences) on the map.
  • Backend stream processing compares t-1 and t-0 coordinates to detect zone incursions.
  • Instantaneous ENTER and EXIT WebSocket alerts are dispatched to the UI.
• Historical Trail Rendering: REST APIs query PostgreSQL to draw historical flight paths (polylines) on demand.
• Polyglot Persistence: Utilizes Redis (in-memory) for sub-millisecond reads of the live map state, and PostgreSQL (relational) for durable time-series positional history.
• Declarative CI/CD: Integrated Jenkinsfile for automated multi-stage Docker builds and JUnit testing.

Backend (Event-Driven Microservice)

• Java 21 & Spring Boot 3
• Apache Kafka (Message Broker)
• Redis (High-speed caching & TTL state management)
• PostgreSQL + Spring Data JPA (Data persistence)
• Spring WebSocket / STOMP

Frontend (Client Dashboard)

• React 18 (Vite + TypeScript)
• Tailwind CSS v4 (Styling)
• Leaflet & React-Leaflet (GIS Mapping & Clustering)
• Lucide React (Symbology)

DevOps & Infrastructure

• Docker & Docker Compose (Containerization & Networking)
• Jenkins (CI/CD Pipeline)
• Multi-stage Dockerfile (Optimized JRE runtime)

• Docker Desktop installed and running.
• Node.js installed (for frontend).

The backend is fully containerized. Open your terminal in the root directory and run:

# Build the Spring Boot image and spin up Kafka, Redis, and Postgres
docker compose up --build -d

# Verify all 4 containers are running
docker compose ps

Open a new terminal and navigate to the frontend directory:

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

Navigate to http://localhost:5173 in your browser. Wait ~10 seconds for the first Kafka polling cycle to complete, and the aircraft will populate the map!

Live Map tracking of commercial aircrafts