Welcome to KNet

KNet is a .NET gateway for Apache Kafka APIs providing all features: Producer, Consumer, Admin, Streams, Connect, backends (ZooKeeper and Kafka).

This project adheres to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please report unacceptable behavior to coc_reporting@masesgroup.com.

Scope of the project

This project aims to create a library to direct access, from .NET, all the features available in the Apache Kafka binary distribution. The packages are downloaded from:

kafka-clients kafka-streams kafka-tools kafka_2.13 connect-runtime
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There are many client libraries written to manage communication with Apache Kafka. Conversely, this project use directly the Java packages released from The Apache Foundation giving more than one benefit:

  • all implemented features are availables at no extra implementation costs, see KNet usage;
  • avoids any third party communication protocol implementation;
  • access all features made available from Apache Kafka: the most important one is Kafka Streams which does not have any C# implementation.

Runtime engine

KNet uses JNet, and indeed JCOBridge with its features, to obtain many benefits:

  • Cyber-security:
    • JVM and CLR, or CoreCLR, runs in the same process, but are insulated from each other;
    • JCOBridge does not make any code injection into JVM;
    • JCOBridge does not use any other communication mechanism than JNI;
    • .NET (CLR) inherently inherits the cyber-security levels of running JVM and Apache Kafka;
  • Direct access the JVM from any .NET application:
    • Any Java/Scala class behind Apache Kafka can be directly managed: Consumer, Producer, Administration, Streams, Server-side, and so on;
    • No need to learn new APIs: we try to expose the same APIs in C# style;
    • No extra validation cycle on protocol and functionality: bug fix, improvements, new features are immediately available;
    • Documentation is shared;
  • Dynamic code: it helps to write a Java/Scala/Kotlin/etc seamless language code directly inside a standard .NET application written in C#/VB.NET: look at this simple example and KNet APIs extensibility.

Have a look at the following resources:

Summary