schema-registry VS rust-rdkafka

So, is JR yet another faking library written in Go? Yes and no. JR indeed implements most of the APIs in fakerjs and Go fake it, but it's also able to stream data directly to stdout, Kafka, Redis and more (Elastic and MongoDB coming). JR can talk directly to Confluent Schema Registry, manage json-schema and Avro schemas, easily maintain coherence and referential integrity. If you need more than what is OOTB in JR, you can also easily pipe your data streams to other cli tools like kcat thanks to its flexibility.

Check here for more details. https://github.com/confluentinc/schema-registry

Confluent Schema Registry for Apache Kafka [GitHub]

So that means we can configure the Kafka producer and consumer with an imaginary schema registry url, that only needs to start with “mock://” and you automatically get to work with the MockSchemaRegistryClient. This way you don't need to explicitly initiate the MockSchemaRegistryClient and configure everything accordingly. That also eradicates the need for the Confluent Schema Registry Container. Running the Kafka Testcontainer with the embedded Zookeeper, we no longer need an extra Zookeeper container and we are down to one Testcontainer for the messaging. This way I ended up with only two Testcontainers: Kafka and the database.

Confluent is a company founded by the creators of Apache Kafka. They are providing the Confluent Platform which consists of several components, all based on Kafka. The license for these components vary. The Schema Registry has the community-license, which basically means it's free to use as long as you don't offer the Schema Registry itself as a SaaS solution. The source code can be found on Github.

Schema Registry from Confluent (GitHub) => http://localhost:8081/

I use this library a lot and it's got some nice touches for how to handle wrapping a C library: https://github.com/fede1024/rust-rdkafka

For this example, we're using rdkafka to build producers and consumers, because it allows us to specify custom headers for each record.

kafka

You might find https://crates.io/crates/rdkafka helpful

I am playing with tokio and rust-rdkafka library, following the examples like this one: https://github.com/fede1024/rust-rdkafka/blob/6fb2c37/examples/asynchronous_processing.rs

The source for the current version of the library can be found on Github. I had to increase the major version because I needed to break the API in order to support all formats supported by the current Schema Registry version. I also added the possibility to set an API key, so it can be used with Confluent Cloud, the cloud offering from Confluent. As part of the latest major refactoring it's also supporting async. This might improve performance of your app, and is also the default for the major Kafka client, more information about why you would want to use async can be found in the async book. The schemas retrieved from the Schema Registry are cached. This way the schema is only retrieved once for each id, and reused for other messages with the same id.

What's wrong with rust-rdkafka?

This is a two-part series to help you get started with Rust and Kafka. We will be using the rust-rdkafka crate which itself is based on librdkafka (C library).