Did this mailing list ever get created? Was there consensus that it did or didn't need created?
-Mark > On Jul 18, 2014, at 14:34, Jay Kreps <jay.kr...@gmail.com> wrote: > > A question was asked in another thread about what was an effective way > to contribute to the Kafka project for people who weren't very > enthusiastic about writing Java/Scala code. > > I wanted to kind of advocate for an area I think is really important > and not as good as it could be--the client ecosystem. I think our goal > is to make Kafka effective as a general purpose, centralized, data > subscription system. This vision only really works if all your > applications, are able to integrate easily, whatever language they are > in. > > We have a number of pretty good non-java producers. We have been > lacking the features on the server-side to make writing non-java > consumers easy. We are fixing that right now as part of the consumer > work going on right now (which moves a lot of the functionality in the > java consumer to the server side). > > But apart from this I think there may be a lot more we can do to make > the client ecosystem better. > > Here are some concrete ideas. If anyone has additional ideas please > reply to this thread and share them. If you are interested in picking > any of these up, please do. > > 1. The most obvious way to improve the ecosystem is to help work on > clients. This doesn't necessarily mean writing new clients, since in > many cases we already have a client in a given language. I think any > way we can incentivize fewer, better clients rather than many > half-working clients we should do. However we are working now on the > server-side consumer co-ordination so it should now be possible to > write much simpler consumers. > > 2. It would be great if someone put together a mailing list just for > client developers to share tips, tricks, problems, and so on. We can > make sure all the main contributors on this too. I think this could be > a forum for kind of directing improvements in this area. > > 3. Help improve the documentation on how to implement a client. We > have tried to make the protocol spec not just a dry document but also > have it share best practices, rationale, and intentions. I think this > could potentially be even better as there is really a range of options > from a very simple quick implementation to a more complex highly > optimized version. It would be good to really document some of the > options and tradeoffs. > > 4. Come up with a standard way of documenting the features of clients. > In an ideal world it would be possible to get the same information > (author, language, feature set, download link, source code, etc) for > all clients. It would be great to standardize the documentation for > the client as well. For example having one or two basic examples that > are repeated for every client in a standardized way. This would let > someone come to the Kafka site who is not a java developer, and click > on the link for their language and view examples of interacting with > Kafka in the language they know using the client they would eventually > use. > > 5. Build a Kafka Client Compatibility Kit (KCCK) :-) The idea is this: > anyone who wants to implement a client would implement a simple > command line program with a set of standardized options. The > compatibility kit would be a standard set of scripts that ran their > client using this command line driver and validate its behavior. E.g. > for a producer it would test that it correctly can send messages, that > the ordering is retained, that the client correctly handles > reconnection and metadata refresh, and compression. The output would > be a list of features that passed are certified, and perhaps basic > performance information. This would be an easy way to help client > developers write correct clients, as well as having a standardized > comparison for the clients that says that they work correctly. > > -Jay
