We are pleased to announce the availability of the Milestone 2 of the Spring for Apache Kafka 1.3 version.

It is available for download from the Milestone Repository:

repositories {
    maven { url 'http://repo.spring.io/libs-milestone' }
}
compile "org.springframework.kafka:spring-kafka:1.3.0.M1"

(Milestone 1 had a blocker issue).

Functionally, the 1.3.x line provides a subset of the 2.0 line (which requires Spring Framework 5.0 and Java 8), but provides support for Java 7 projects and Spring Framework 4.3.x.

It is primarily intended to provide early access to 0.11.0.0 Apache Kafka client features, but here is a summary:

• Apache Kafka 0.11.0.0 client;

• Improved listener container threading model facilitated by KIP-62;

• With the new Apache Kafka foundation we have introduced the KafkaTransactionManager and local transaction support in the KafkaTemplate via new executeInTransaction() operation;

• The KafkaListenerContainer can now be supplied with a TransactionManager to perform polling and offset commits with transaction boundaries, and to synchronize a Kafka transaction with some external transaction manager.

• Support for the new Kafka Headers feature is also provided. Now you can send and receive messages with any arbitrary headers, for example build request-reply scenarios using some correlationKey header;

• The KafkaEmbedded JUnit class/Spring Bean can now be supplied with any arbitrary brokerProperties;

• The KafkaAdmin can be used to automatically create topics by scanning the application context for NewTopic beans.

In addition, Spring Integration extension for Apache Kafka 2.3.0.M2 is available to incorporate the Spring for Apache Kafka 1.3 foundation. In particular the KafkaProducerMessageHandler can be supplied with the KafkaHeaderMapper, where the DefaultKafkaHeaderMapper is used by default if the Jackson JSON processor is present in the classpath. If also includes enhancements to error handling.

spring-integration-kafke 2.2.0.M1 is also available for spring-kafka 1.2.x. It includes the enhanced error handling mentioned above.

See the Project Page for a complete matrix of spring-kafka, spring-integration-kafka and kafka-clients version compatibility.

Thanks to all community members for any feedback and contributions!

General availability of the 1.3.0 release is expected to be in September alongside the 2.0.0.RELEASE. Feedback, feature requests and, of course, contributions are welcomed via the usual channels:

Project Page | Issues | Contributing | Help | Chat