Oracle Service Bus: Produce messages to a Kafka topic

Oracle Service Bus is a powerful tool to provide features like transformation, throttling, virtualization of messages coming from different sources. There is a (recently opensourced!) Kafka transport available for Oracle Service Bus (see here). Oracle Service Bus can thus be used to do all kinds of interesting things to messages coming from Kafka topics. You can then produce altered messages to other Kafka topics and create a decoupled processing chain. In this blog I provide an example on how to use Oracle Service Bus to produce messages to a Kafka topic.

Oracle Service Bus: A quickstart for the Kafka transport

As mentioned on the following blog post by Lucas Jellema, Kafka is going to play a part in several Oracle products. For some usecases it might eventually even replace JMS. In order to allow for easy integration with Kafka, you can use Oracle Service Bus to create a virtualization layer around Kafka. Ricardo Ferreira from Oracle's A-Team has done some great work on making a custom Kafka Service Bus transport available to us. Read more about this here: http://www.ateam-oracle.com/osb-transport-for-apache-kafka-part-1/, http://www.ateam-oracle.com/oracle-service-bus-transport-for-apache-kafka-part-2/ and http://www.ateam-oracle.com/custom-transports-in-osb-12-2-1/. The Kafka transport is not an 'officially supported' transport. Quote from the A-team blog: 'The Kafka transport is provided for free to use “AS-IS” but without any official support from Oracle. The A-Team reserves the right of help in the best-effort capacity.'. I hope it will become an officially supported part of the Service Bus product in the future.

In this blog I summarize what I have done to get the end to end sample working for SOA Suite 12.2.1.2.0 and Kafka 0.10.1.0 based on the blogs I mentioned. This allows you to quickly start developing against Apache Kafka.