cl-huey is a Common framework that enables the creation of event-driven systems leveraging Kafka and (soon) REST services. The name is inspired by this hoary aviation quote:

Helicopters are a bunch of parts flying in relatively close formation, all rotating around a different axis.

To a first approximation, that’s an excellent description of a decoupled software architecture. One of the most storied helicopters is the Bell UH-1B “Huey”, hence the name.

This repo can be installed with Quicklisp:

(ql:quickload :cl-huey)

[ TODO: verify that the above works ]

cl-huey expects two special variables to be set:

(defvar *kafka-bootstrap-brokers* "localhost:9092")
(defvar *zookeeper-servers* "localhost:2181")

[ TODO: validate use of special variables ]

The current implementation of cl-huey uses a standard message formant consisting of headers and a payload. All messages on Kafka are in JSON format and must include at least two elements:

• correlationid is a key that ties multiple related messages together. It is used for partitioning Kafka topics.
• payload is the content of the message. It can be any valid JSON. [ TODO: Add future to allow specification of message format ]

cl-huey provides a function to write messages to a Kafka topic. cl-huey-test-producer.lisp demonstrates how to use it:

(ql:quickload :cl-huey)

(cl-huey:produce topic-name correlation-id payload)

[ TODO: How to get command line arguments? ]

To receive messages from Kafka, register a function that accepts a correlation ID and a payload (cl-huey converts the JSON received from Kafka into s-expressions):

(ql:quickload :cl-huey)

(defun on-message (id payload)
  (format t "Correlation ID:  ~s~&Payload:  ~s~&" id payload))

(cl-huey:register #'on-message
                  :topic topic-name +topic-name+
                  :consumer-group +consumer-group+
                  :error-topic +error-topic-name+)

(cl-huey:start)

[ TODO: caps or not for directives? use format or write? what returned? ] If the registered message handling function cannot process the messasge, it must raise an error. cl-huey:recoverable-message-error is used when the message should be retried. cl-huey:unrecoverable-message-error is used when the message cannot be processed.

By default, unrecoverable messages are written to the topic cl-huey:*unrecoverable-message-topic*. This can be overridden with the :error-topic parameter of cl-huey:register.

The cl-huey:register function can also accept a condition handler as an optional argument, :condition-handler, for more complex error handling. [ TODO: verify use of keywords in this way and how to pass (:cl-huey:foo) ]

cl-huey supports registering additional functions while it is running.

The cl-huey repository includes a Dockerfile that creates an image that runs cl-huey in SBCL. To add your code to it:

[ TODO ]