A new web-based interface for reading data from Kafka Clusters has been released. Kafka Webview can be used for reading data out of Kafka topics and providing basic filtering and searching capabilities.

Kafka Webview has been developed to provide an easy to use web based interface to Kafka. You can use it to connect to multiple Kafa clusters. You can connect to the clusters using plaintext or SSL, meaning you can connect to SSL authenticated clusters. Webview supports standard key and value deserializers, and you can upload custom key and value deserializers.

You do have the option of configuring custom Message Formats to specify how clients should deserialize your data. Out of the box Kafka WebView supports the following Deserializers that can be used for both Keys and Values:

• ByteArray
• Bytes
• Double
• Float
• Integer
• Long
• Short
• String

If data is stored using a custom format such as Avro or ProtocolBuffers, you can upload a JAR containing custom Deserializer implementations to extend support to WebView to be able to properly deserialize your data format.

One area where Webview adds to Kafka is in the ability to create and use filters. Filters allow you to implement an Interface that can be used on the server side to filter messages coming from Kafka. There are several benefits to doing filtering on the server side in this way. The filters can be used as a simple search-like filter to cut down on the data being selected, so avoiding passing large amounts of data to the client web browser when you're looking for a small subset of messages. Filters can also be used to enforce a restricted view of data from a Topic.

Views can also be defined in Webview. Views let you configure a Topic to consume from, configure which Message Formats the Topic uses, and optionally apply any Filters.

In addition to being available as a Docker image, there's an example project for Webview on Github written in Maven. This can be cloned and used as a template. The template is configured with all of the correct dependencies and comes with some example implementations.

More Information

Kafka Webview on Github 

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