Kraftsman

A Kafka wire protocol workbench. Craft a request, send it to a broker, inspect the decoded response — all driven by the Kafka client's own message schemas.

Status: early stage / work in progress. Many APIs are untested, the UI is rough, and breaking changes land without notice. Expect sharp edges.

What it does

• Browse every Kafka API and version exposed by the kafka-clients library
• Edit requests as YAML with schema-driven validation and completion, or via a structured GUI
• Send raw wire-protocol requests to a broker and see the decoded response as a tree
• Useful for protocol exploration, debugging proxies, and learning the wire format

Stack

• Kotlin + Compose Multiplatform (desktop)
• org.apache.kafka:kafka-clients for the message schemas and wire codec
• Jackson (YAML) for the editor round-trip

Run

./gradlew :composeApp:run

Requires a JDK 25 toolchain (resolved automatically via Foojay).

Package

./gradlew :composeApp:packageDistributionForCurrentOS

Produces a .dmg / .msi / .deb in composeApp/build/compose/binaries/.

Snapshots

CI builds installers for macOS, Windows, and Linux on every push to main. Grab the latest from the Actions tab — pick the most recent green run and download the artifact for your OS.