For the new producer code we currently added the new module clients This builds the jar kafka-clients.jar. The core module should be renamed to kafka-server and producer kafka-server.jar.
It is the intention that the server will end up depending on the clients but not vice versa (or we could make a separate module for that if we like). Integration code that tests clients against the server will live with the server. There is some shared code between the clients and server. This is the kafka.common package. Currently this is in the clients module, which is a little odd. We could alternatively break it into its own module, which might be nice. However I'm not sure it really warrants its own jar since there isn't much point to that code on its own and having the clients need two jars is kind of annoying. But maybe this doesn't matter because everyone just uses Maven? So the options are: A) Leave it the way it is: kafka-clients.jar and kafka-server.jar. B) Separate out the common code and have kafka-common.jar, kafka-clients.jar and kafka-server.jar (clients depends on common, and server depends on clients and common). C) Make a jar for each client. Currently this would be just producer and consumer, but in the future we could add a more well-defined an Admin client for some of the administrative functions. If there ended up being code that is client-specific but shared by multiple clients this could be problematic. Alternately I don't know if the mapping from sub-modules to jars needs to be one-to-one so we could seperate the clients and common code to enforce compile dependencies and then glump it all into one client jar. That might anger the build system, though. I think I vote for (A) but don't really care much. -Jay
