Kafka Notify - A Golang Project for Learning

Kafka Notify is a basic project designed to help you learn the fundamentals of the Go programming language while working with Apache Kafka for event notification. This project aims to provide a simple yet practical example of how to produce and consume messages using Kafka in a Go application.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Features
• Getting Started
  • Prerequisites
  • Installation
• Tools
• Usage
  • Configuration
  • Producing Messages
  • Consuming Messages
• Contributing
• License

Introduction

Kafka Notify is designed for those who are new to both the Go programming language and Apache Kafka. This project walks you through the process of setting up a simple messaging system using Kafka, where producers can send messages and consumers can receive and process those messages. By following this project, you'll gain hands-on experience with Go's syntax, Kafka's concepts, and the integration between the two.

Features

• Basic Kafka Interaction: Learn how to set up a connection to a Kafka broker, create a topic, and send/receive messages.
• Producer Implementation: Understand how to create a Kafka message producer in Go to publish messages to a topic.
• Consumer Implementation: Learn how to create a Kafka message consumer in Go to subscribe to a topic and process incoming messages.
• Configuration: Explore how to configure Kafka connection parameters and project settings.
• Serialization: Gain insights into message serialization and deserialization using JSON.
• Error Handling: Learn about basic error handling strategies in Go.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

To get started with Kafka Notify, ensure you have the following installed:

• Go (1.14 or higher)
• Apache Kafka (2.0 or higher) - Download and Installation Guide

Installation

1. Clone this repository to your local machine:

   git clone https://github.com/buzzcoode/kafka-notify.git

2. Navigate to the project directory:
```bash
  cd kafka-notify

3. Install the required Go dependencies:

  go mod download

Tools

This project uses the following tools:

• Golang for backend development
• Go-Gin for route management
• Kafka for event notification

Usage

1. Start the producer

Open up a terminal, move into the kafka-notify directory, and run the producer with the following command:

  go run cmd/producer/producer.go

2. Start the consumer

Open up a second terminal window, navigate to the kafka-notify directory, and start the consumer by running:

  go run cmd/consumer/consumer.go

3. Sending notifications With both producer and consumer running, you can simulate sending notifications. Open up a third terminal and use the below curl commands to send notifications:

User 1 (Fernando) receives a notification from User 2 (Júlia):

  curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/send \
-d "fromID=2&toID=1&message=Júlia started following you."

User 2 (Júlia) receives a notification from User 1 (Fernando):

  curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/send \
-d "fromID=1&toID=2&message=Fernando mentioned you in a comment: 'Great seeing you yesterday, @Fernando!'"

User 1 (Fernando) receives a notification from User 4 (Dedaldino):

  curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/send \
-d "fromID=4&toID=1&message=Dedaldino liked your post: 'Drink more water!'"

4. Retrieving notifications

Finally, you can fetch the notifications of a specific user. You can use the below curl commands to fetch notifications:

Retrieving notifications for User 1 (Fernando):

  curl http://localhost:8081/notifications/1

Output:

  {"notifications": [{"from": {"id": 2, "name": "Júlia"}, "to": {"id": 1, "name": "Fernando"}, "message": "Júlia started following you."}]}
  {"notifications": [{"from": {"id": 4, "name": "Dedaldino"}, "to": {"id": 1, "name": "Fernando"}, "message": "Dedaldino liked your post: 'Drink more water!'"}]}

Contributing

Contributions to Kafka Notify are welcome! Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests for improvements or fixes. Please follow the existing coding style and guidelines.

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License

Kafka Notify is open-source software licensed under the MIT License.