Reactive kafka consumer

[vasantteja]

I was thinking of building a reactive kafka consumer and producer. I came across this https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65627958/how-do-you-use-a-kafkalistener-annotated-method-with-a-flux-or-mono. Is there way we can create a reactive consumer and producer with spring-kafka?

[garyrussell]

No; we started investigating some time ago but came to the conclusion that it wouldn't add much benefit over using the KafkaReceiver from reactor-kafka.

spring-kafka has a couple of lightweight templates on top of reactor-kafka but, again, they don't really add much value.

[garyrussell]

Let me turn that around - exactly what functionality do you need that you can't achieve with reactor-kafka?

Spring would not be involved with the messaging at runtime, only to set up the topology, so the framework can't help with error handling, for example.

[ahmedalnuaimi]

I want to integrate it using Autoconfiguration just the way WebFlux is integrated.

[garyrussell]

Right, but that is spring-boot, it does not mean more integration in this project.

There is an open PR there; but it hasn't had much movement.

[ahmedalnuaimi]

Ah OK so this PR is not related to the Spring Boot effort, right?

[garyrussell]

No; this was about adding something like

@KafkaListener(...)
void listen(Flux<Foo> flux) {
   ...
}

Which doesn't make much sense because Spring would only be involved in setting up the topology; it would not be involved with the runtime record reception/processing.