-1 As an end-user, while I like the idea in theory, in practice I don't think it's a good idea just yet.
Certainly, it'd be useful, enabling things like https://github.com/Landoop/kafka-topics-ui to work without needing anything outside of Kafka core. But there are already enough things in the existing Kafka core that feel a little half-baked, especially on the ops side... there's been a few threads lately on the users mailing list where users have asked about functionality that seems like it should be standard and all proffered solutions have seemed a bit hacky. Similarly, while I understand the argument that having a solid HTTP endpoint would obviate the need for other language bindings, I'm not sure that's what would happen. From a speed perspective, I'd often rather use the native bindings in my language of choice, even if it's unofficial and may be lagging behind on features. So this doesn't feel that compelling to me. I'd rather the Kafka community focus on making Kafka rock-solid at what it does, particularly having the existing CLI ops tooling and docs be really solid before trying to add fairly major new pieces to the project. Plus I think it's very beneficial for the Kafka community for Confluent to have a strong business model--they provide many contributions to core that most of us benefit from for free. Keeping a few things like the REST interface under their umbrella gives them free marketing exposure while still allowing the rest of us access to their tooling as free/open-source. On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 2:16 PM, Harsha Chintalapani <ka...@harsha.io> wrote: > Hi All, > We are proposing to have a REST Server as part of Apache Kafka > to provide producer/consumer/admin APIs. We Strongly believe having > REST server functionality with Apache Kafka will help a lot of users. > Here is the KIP that Mani Kumar wrote > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP- > 80:+Kafka+Rest+Server. > There is a discussion thread in dev list that had differing opinions on > whether to include REST server in Apache Kafka or not. You can read more > about that in this thread > http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/kafka-dev/201610.mbox/%3CCAMVt_ > aymqeudm39znsxgktpdde46sowmqhsxop-+jmbcuv7...@mail.gmail.com%3E > > This is a VOTE thread to check interest in the community for > adding REST Server implementation in Apache Kafka. > > Thanks, > Harsha >