Ballerina Kafka Library

This library provides an implementation to interact with Kafka Brokers via Kafka Consumer and Kafka Producer clients.

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform used for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications.

This library supports Kafka 1.x.x, 2.x.x and 3.x.x versions.

Consumer and producer

Kafka producer

A Kafka producer is a Kafka client that publishes records to the Kafka cluster. The producer is thread-safe and sharing a single producer instance across threads will generally be faster than having multiple instances. When working with a Kafka producer, the first thing to do is to initialize the producer. For the producer to execute successfully, an active Kafka broker should be available.

The code snippet given below initializes a producer with the basic configuration.

import ballerinax/kafka;

kafka:ProducerConfiguration producerConfiguration = {
    clientId: "basic-producer",
    acks: "all",
    retryCount: 3
};

kafka:Producer kafkaProducer = check new (kafka:DEFAULT_URL, producerConfiguration);

Kafka consumer

A Kafka consumer is a subscriber responsible for reading records from one or more topics and one or more partitions of a topic. When working with a Kafka consumer, the first thing to do is initialize the consumer. For the consumer to execute successfully, an active Kafka broker should be available.

The code snippet given below initializes a consumer with the basic configuration.

kafka:ConsumerConfiguration consumerConfiguration = {
    groupId: "group-id",    // Unique string that identifies the consumer
    offsetReset: "earliest",    // Offset reset strategy if no initial offset
    topics: ["kafka-topic"]
};

kafka:Consumer kafkaConsumer = check new (kafka:DEFAULT_URL, consumerConfiguration);

Listener

The Kafka consumer can be used as a listener to a set of topics without the need to manually poll the messages.

You can use the Caller to manually commit the offsets of the messages that are read by the service. The following code snippet shows how to initialize and define the listener and how to commit the offsets manually.

kafka:ConsumerConfiguration consumerConfiguration = {
    groupId: "group-id",
    topics: ["kafka-topic-1"],
    pollingInterval: 1,
    autoCommit: false
};

listener kafka:Listener kafkaListener = new (kafka:DEFAULT_URL, consumerConfiguration);

service on kafkaListener {
    remote function onConsumerRecord(kafka:Caller caller, kafka:BytesConsumerRecord[] records) {
        // processes the records
        ...
        // commits the offsets manually
        kafka:Error? commitResult = caller->commit();

        if commitResult is kafka:Error {
            log:printError("Error occurred while committing the offsets for the consumer ", 'error = commitResult);
        }
    }
}

Data serialization

Serialization is the process of converting data into a stream of bytes that is used for transmission. Kafka stores and transmits these bytes of arrays in its queue. Deserialization does the opposite of serialization in which bytes of arrays are converted into the desired data type.

Currently, this library only supports the byte array data type for both the keys and values. The following code snippets show how to produce and read a message from Kafka.

string message = "Hello World, Ballerina";
string key = "my-key";
// converts the message and key to a byte array
check kafkaProducer->send({ topic: "test-kafka-topic", key: key.toBytes(), value: message.toBytes() });

kafka:BytesConsumerRecord[] records = check kafkaConsumer->poll(1);

foreach var kafkaRecord in records {
    byte[] messageContent = kafkaRecord.value;
    // tries to generate the string value from the byte array
    string result = check string:fromBytes(messageContent);
    io:println("The result is : ", result);
}

Concurrency

In Kafka, records are grouped into smaller units called partitions. These can be processed independently without compromising the correctness of the results and lays the foundation for parallel processing. This can be achieved by using multiple consumers within the same group each reading and processing data from a subset of topic partitions and running in a single thread.

Topic partitions are assigned to consumers automatically or you can manually assign topic partitions.

The following code snippet joins a consumer to the consumer-group and assigns it to a topic partition manually.

kafka:ConsumerConfiguration consumerConfiguration = {
    // `groupId` determines the consumer group
    groupId: "consumer-group",
    pollingInterval: 1,
    autoCommit: false
};

kafka:Consumer kafkaConsumer = check new (kafka:DEFAULT_URL, consumerConfiguration);
// creates a topic partition
kafka:TopicPartition topicPartition = {
    topic: "kafka-topic-1",
    partition: 1
};
// passes the topic partitions to the assign function as an array
check kafkaConsumer->assign([topicPartition]);

Issues and projects

Issues and Projects tabs are disabled for this repository as this is part of the Ballerina Standard Library. To report bugs, request new features, start new discussions, view project boards, etc., go to the Ballerina Standard Library parent repository.

This repository only contains the source code for the library.

Build from the source

Set up the prerequisites

• Download and install Java SE Development Kit (JDK) version 21 (from one of the following locations).

  • Oracle

  • OpenJDK

    Note: Set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to the path name of the directory into which you installed JDK.

2. Download and install Docker. This is required to run the tests.

Build the source

Execute the commands below to build from the source.

1. To build the library:

   ./gradlew clean build
   

2. To run the tests:

   ./gradlew clean test
   

3. To build the library without the tests:

   ./gradlew clean build -x test
   

4. To debug library implementation:

   ./gradlew clean build -Pdebug=<port>
   

5. To debug the library with Ballerina language:

   ./gradlew clean build -PbalJavaDebug=<port>
   

6. Publish ZIP artifact to the local .m2 repository:

   ./gradlew clean build publishToMavenLocal
   

7. Publish the generated artifacts to the local Ballerina central repository:

   ./gradlew clean build -PpublishToLocalCentral=true
   

8. Publish the generated artifacts to the Ballerina central repository:

   ./gradlew clean build -PpublishToCentral=true
   

Contribute to Ballerina

As an open source project, Ballerina welcomes contributions from the community.

For more information, go to the contribution guidelines.

Code of conduct

All the contributors are encouraged to read the Ballerina Code of Conduct.

Useful links

• For more information go to the kafka library.
• For example demonstrations of the usage, go to Ballerina By Examples.
• Chat live with us via our Discord server.
• Post all technical questions on Stack Overflow with the #ballerina tag.