Helpful Tools for Apache Kafka Developers

Apache Kafka is at the core of a large ecosystem that includes powerful components such as Kafka Connect and Kafka Streams. This article discusses several tools and utilities that can help Kafka developers become more productive, including kafkacat, Confluent REST Proxy, jq, and the Kafka Streams Topology Visualizer. These tools provide various functionalities such as quickly producing and consuming data to and from a topic, easily producing Avro data to a Kafka topic, formatting, manipulating, and extracting data from JSON output of other programs, and creating a graphic representation showing input topics, processing nodes, interim topics, state stores, etc. The article also mentions the release of Apache Kafka 3.8.0, which contains many new features and improvements.