Hello all! I've been working on a pet project over the last couple of months building out a web based interface for consuming from Kafka called Kafka Web View <https://github.com/SourceLabOrg/kafka-webview>.
I often found myself going to kafka-console-consumer to manually inspect or find data in Kafka. Between wanting to filter for specific records, using custom deserializers, and seeking to specific offsets or timestamps, the command line tool starts to become a bit unwieldy to use. On top of that in production environments access to consoles or the clusters are typically limited. This project allows you to define "Views" over Kafka topics which include configuring key and value deserializers as well as server side filtering logic. Using a view you can then "page" through records starting from the head or tail of the topic, seek to specific offsets or timestamps, and enable customizable filters. The tool also allows you to stream a view/records to your browser using web sockets. Hoping someone else out there will find it useful as well, and definitely open to suggestions or contributions. Stephen
