I am using Kafka Connect in source mode i.e. using it to send events to Kafka topics.
With the key.converter and value.converter properties set to org.apache.kafka.connect.storage.StringConverter I can attach a consumer to the topics and see the events in a readable form. This is helpful and reassuring but it is not the desired representation for my downstream consumers - these require the events to be Avro encoded. It seems that to write the events to Kafka Avro encoded, these properties need to be set to io.confluent.kafka.serializers.KafkaAvroSerializer. Is this correct? I am not using the Confluent platform, merely the standard Kafka 10 download, and have been unable to find out how to get at these from a Maven repository jar. http://docs.confluent.io/3.0.0/app-development.html#java suggest that these are available via: <dependency> <groupId>io.confluent</groupId> <artifactId>kafka-avro-serializer</artifactId> <version>3.0.0</version> </dependency> But it doesn't appear to be true. The class exists in https://raw.githubusercontent.com/confluentinc/schema-registry/master/avro-converter/src/main/java/io/confluent/connect/avro/AvroConverter.java but this seems to use the Schema Registry which is something I'd rather avoid. I'd be grateful for any pointers on the simplest way of getting Avro encoded events written to Kafka from a Kafka Connect source connector/task. Also in the task which creates SourceRecords, I'm choosing Schema.BYTES_SCHEMA for the 4th arg in the constructor. But I'm not clear what this achieves - some light shed on that would also be helpful. Many thanks, David
