Looking for more Collaborators!

Hi everybody.

First off, I just want to thank the community for all of the support this repository has gotten. A few years ago when I started working on what would become node-rdkafka, I never could have imagined it getting this big! It wouldn’t be nearly as big without all of you - your contributions, your bug reports, and the inspiration to keep me working on it.

This project originated on Blizzard’s data team. We built out kafka support in node.js because we were using node for message streaming from HTTP to kafka to be processed by our downstream services. A few months after that, we stopped using node for new projects so we started using the library less. I still supported it as best I could, and we had still had existing services that used it that were made better with every release!

About 6 months ago I moved to another team that doesn’t use any node.js, and the amount of time I’ve had to commit on this repository has gone to its lowest ever. This would be more OK, but my free weekend-time has also been at an all time low.

So, this has all been a long way of saying I need help! I’d like to give some of the responsibility for the management of this project to some of you. If you are interested at all please email me at [e-mail]!

I’m hoping to get more active again as best I can to give this project the support it deserves. There’s a lot of work to be done on it to make it even better! If that excites you, send me an email!

Thank you everyone for your continued patience. Its totally undeserved, but appreciated 😃

[webmakersteve]

@rusty0412

There isn’t specifically a road-map. So far there has been very little process involved in what we are upgrading or doing at any given time. Previously it was driven by what I was having to work with at the time (since I was actually using the library), but nowadays I’ve done very little to actually push the library forward and rely on just merging PRs that come in and providing feedback.

Here is what I’d like to see done in the future:

1. Drop all support for < 8
2. Add promise compatible APIs for async functions, or just an easy Promisify wrapper available to wrap all the method calls so they can be used with async await
3. Upgrade NAN and get rid of all of the deprecations we have. This is a pretty big effort as the async worker handling has been hugely changed.
4. A lot of C++ refactoring - the code is very old and looks it. There is a lot of stuff that can be consolidated to reduce the huge amount of sprawl.
5. Get rid of the bundled librdkafka as part of the base package in favor of having a dependency on it being provided as a shared library in the box. I can be convinced that this is a bad idea, but so many of the problems with this library deal with the fact that it is built from source at install time.
6. First-class typescript support
7. A lot of CI improvements. Maybe migrate to circle CI? But mainly I want the builder to publish the package on every master build with pre-release tags and auto publish tagged builds.
8. Better testing. Need to make a mocked version of the thin librdkafka classes and inject those around.
9. Continue implementing new features of librdkafka. There are ways we can do FD polling for more efficient consumption in streams, etc.

If this sounds interesting to you, let me know! But I can also announce that I’ve added @iradul, @ankon , and @codeburke as collaborators, so thank you guys for volunteering! I appreciate all the help.

[iradul]

Good news! We can now publish new versions via Travis. I’ve successfully published 2.7.4.