Streaming data

This guide shows how to build bespoke, enriched event streams from Kafka.

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Describing the data sources

The architecture for this demo

Our demo has a few services running, which we’ll join together to create a bespoke event stream:

• Kafka Service: A Topic that publishes a message whenever a new review is published
• FilmsDb: A database containing a list of films
• ListingsService: A REST API that tells us where our movies are currently playing

Our services share a taxonomy used to describe the elements we can fetch:

namespace petflix

type FilmId inherits String
type FilmTitle inherits String
type ReviewText inherits String
type PerformanceDate inherits DateTime
type TheatreName inherits String

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Adding the Kafka broker

Configure the Kafka connection in connections.conf:

kafka {
    "myKafkaBroker" {
        connectionName=myKafkaBroker
        connectionParameters {
            brokerAddress="localhost:9092"
            groupId=orbital
        }
    }
}

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Describing the Kafka topic

Next, add some Taxi metadata to the message written onto our Kafka topic:

syntax = "proto3";
import "taxi/dataType.proto";

message NewReviewPostedMessage {
  int32 filmId = 1 [(taxi.dataType)="petflix.FilmId"];
  string reviewText = 2 [(taxi.dataType)="petflix.ReviewText"];
}

Finally, declare the Kafka topic:

service KafkaService {
  stream reviews : Stream<NewReviewPostedMessage>
}

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Creating an event stream

We can create a dedicated event stream, with the data we need by submitting the following query to Orbital:

stream { NewReviewPostedMessage } as {
  // We define the field names that matter to us.
  // Orbital matches on data types, as field names often differ between systems. 
  id : FilmId 
  review : ReviewText

  name : FilmTitle // Fetched by a database call
  nextPerformances: FilmListing[] // Fetched by a REST API call
}

Orbital performs the integration, and delivers us messages containing exactly the data we need.