A New UI for Kafka Connect: Your Favorite IDE!

Many of us have had difficulty developing connector configurations before. The process involves many iterations of reading docs, editing a config, and applying that config to see what went wrong. Each of these cycles is just fast enough that we put up with it, but the minutes can add up to hours or days of resubmitting configurations over and over. What if testing your connector configuration happened as you typed, and each cycle was just seconds?

Using the industry standard Language Server Protocol (LSP) in a creative way, you can have configuration auto-completion, diagnostic errors, and documentation appear inside your favorite Integrated Development Environment (IDE)! This automatically brings up relevant information, and makes configuration development faster and more agile. We’ll introduce the LSP, how it enables simple development of cross-cutting IDE features, and how we’ve adapted the LSP to handle Connector Configurations. We’ll also demonstrate the Connector Configuration plugin for IntelliJ providing live feedback from a running Connect cluster while writing a connector configuration from scratch. This will also be your chance to influence future features of the IDE plugin, and see how the LSP can improve the development experience for other parts of the Kafka ecosystem.