Hermes VS nats-dart

Let's draw some parallels in the Kafka ecosystem, in which there are Confluent REST Proxy and Hermes by Allegro. You could say that since Kafka uses a binary protocol over TCP, both of these projects are "moot and useless". Despite that, Allegro aka the Poland's Amazon still maintains that project and uses it in production as a means of HTTP-based communication between their 700+ microservices arguing that it makes their development process easier, since it allows them to abstract away the intricacies of Kafka and use plain HTTP instead.

well, there is https://github.com/allegro/hermes

NATS has it's own custom text based protocol, and the client ecosystem is not as mature as others', like MQTT. In fact, I developed the NATS Dart client initially to be used from Flutter apps, but now can be used on Dart servers as well. Ivan from NATS is currently working on native MQTT v3.5 support (releasing sometime soon) and v5 support landing in Q1 2021 (Source: NATS Roadmap). I see here that they're building the Go implementation from scratch, which is interesting. They also seem to be converting every MQTT topic to a NATS topic for backward compatibility (obviously, duh) - I'm not sure if this brings any challenges down the line.