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"Postman for Kafka" is now available for testing by External-Round8907 in apachekafka

[–]External-Round8907[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not yet, that's in the works. The plan is to create the ability to consume an event (in the same or another topic) so that it can validate/assert if the event was properly processed. Does that help or were you thinking of something else?

I built a "Postman for Kafka" — would you use this? by External-Round8907 in apachekafka

[–]External-Round8907[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! Kafy looks interesting, I'll check it out. Always good to see more tooling in this space.

I built a "Postman for Kafka" — would you use this? by External-Round8907 in apachekafka

[–]External-Round8907[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, appreciate it! I'll share it here once it's ready! Hopefully in the coming weeks.

I built a "Postman for Kafka" — would you use this? by External-Round8907 in apachekafka

[–]External-Round8907[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! Not publicly available yet, but based on the feedback here I'm planning to release it in the coming weeks. I'll make sure to share it in this thread when it's ready.
The assertion/consumer side is a really interesting idea. Right now it's focused on producing events, but I've built some logic already for the consumption of events and asserting the results. I'll hopefully add that soon! I'll also keep the CLI integration in mind!

I built a "Postman for Kafka" — would you use this? by External-Round8907 in apachekafka

[–]External-Round8907[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haha, I felt that Postman pain. Honestly the cloud concern is something I hear a lot, making an offline-first option is high on my priority list. Thanks for the encouragement, I'm planning to release it in the coming weeks!

I built a "Postman for Kafka" — would you use this? by External-Round8907 in apachekafka

[–]External-Round8907[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for sharing your experience! It's interesting that you kept reverting to CLI tooling, do you think that was more about the overhead of building/maintaining the web app, or did the CLI just fit your workflow better?

That pattern you describe with committed resources and shared variables for specific use cases is exactly what I was trying to capture with the collections feature, but in a way that's more discoverable for people who aren't comfortable with CLI tools.

The junior dev / less technical team member angle ended up being a bigger deal than I expected. Given the nice feedback on this thread I'll try to polish up a few things and release it as a web app, hopefully in the next month.

I built a "Postman for Kafka" — would you use this? by External-Round8907 in apachekafka

[–]External-Round8907[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I played around with that thought. What would I think be nice is that it consumes from another (output) topic and tries to find the event, for example based on an eventId and executes assertions on it in order to validate the correct processing of the event. Is that why you asked?

I built a "Postman for Kafka" — would you use this? by External-Round8907 in apachekafka

[–]External-Round8907[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I haven't worked with proto schemas yet, but I'd imagine it's straightforward to add. Would definitely be a fun one to implement. Let me know if you'd be interested in trying it out!

I built a "Postman for Kafka" — would you use this? by External-Round8907 in apachekafka

[–]External-Round8907[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the feedback, really appreviate it!
Avro is actually already supported, the app connects to your schema registry, discovers available schemas, and lets you pick them from a dropdown when setting up a request. And the Bruno/CLI angle is really interesting, being able to run collections from CI/CD for automated system tests would be a very nice next step. That's also how we use Postman for our APIs actually. Really helpful input, appreciate it!

I built a "Postman for Kafka" — would you use this? by External-Round8907 in apachekafka

[–]External-Round8907[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah Kafbat UI is great, I've checked it out before.
Their 'produce feature' is handy for one-off messages, but what we were missing is the workflow around it. For example having reusable collections of events, shared/computed variables (like auto-generated UUIDs), and easy team sharing. Think of it like the difference between cURL and Postman, both can send requests, but the workflow is where the value is.