Hi all, I’ve been working for several years now on a streaming data platform, and we’ve been using Avro to serialize the messages that flow through the distributed queue (Kafka/Kinesis). Because the message payload contains just one record or a small batch of Avro records, the serialization mechanisms are slightly different than the typical file-based ones. I wrote a few utility classes that facilitate the serialization and deserialization of records in the data streaming context, and I’m poking the community to see if there’s an appetite for me contributing it back to the main Avro project – as opposed to creating a small independent library.
The utility allows to convert a record with a single method call: - from a GenericRecord (and therefore SpecificRecord as well) to binary or json - from binary or json to a GenericRecord - from binary or json to a SpecificRecord There’s also a few additional utility methods to generically get an attribute or its schema based on a path, provided as a string array. So first, I haven’t seen a utility like that, but please correct me if I missed it. Then do you think it’ll be a contribution that you’d welcome? Thanks! Gabriel
