Hi, I'm trying to write to a Kafka stream in a Flink job using the new Python streaming API.
My program looks like this: def main(factory): props = Properties() props.setProperty("bootstrap.servers",configs['kafkaBroker']) consumer = FlinkKafkaConsumer010([configs['kafkaReadTopic']], SimpleStringSchema(), props) producer = FlinkKafkaProducer010(configs['kafkaWriteTopic'], SimpleStringSchema(), props) env = factory.get_execution_environment() stream = env.add_java_source(consumer) stream.output() # this works (prints to a .out file) stream.add_sink(producer) # producing to this causes the exception env.execute() I'm getting a ClassCastException when trying to output to the FlinkKafkaProducer: java.lang.ClassCastException: org.python.core.PyUnicode cannot be cast to java.lang.String at org.apache.flink.api.common.serialization.SimpleStringSchema.serialize(SimpleStringSchema.java:36) at org.apache.flink.streaming.util.serialization.KeyedSerializationSchemaWrapper.serializeValue(KeyedSerializationSchemaWrapper.java:46) at org.apache.flink.streaming.connectors.kafka.FlinkKafkaProducer010.invoke(FlinkKafkaProducer010.java:355) at org.apache.flink.streaming.python.api.functions.PythonSinkFunction.invoke(PythonSinkFunction.java:48) at org.apache.flink.streaming.python.api.functions.PythonSinkFunction.invoke(PythonSinkFunction.java:37) at org.apache.flink.streaming.api.operators.StreamSink.processElement(StreamSink.java:56) at org.apache.flink.streaming.runtime.tasks.OperatorChain$CopyingChainingOutput.pushToOperator(OperatorChain.java:579) It seems that the Python string isn't getting converted to a java.lang.String, which should happen automatically in Jython. I've tried adding a MapFunction that maps each input to String(input)where String is the constructor for java.lang.String. This made no difference; I get the same error. Any ideas? Thanks, Joe Malt Software Engineering Intern Yelp