If you are familiar with Enterprise Integration world for sure you know Kafka, one of the most famous projects from Apache Foundation for the last years, and also if you are in Integration World you know TIBCO Software, and some of our flagship products like TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks for integration, TIBCO Cloud Integration as our iPaaS, TIBCO AMX BPM, TIBCO BusinessEvents.. and I could continue that list over and over.. 🙂
But, probably you don’t know about TIBCO(R) Messaging — Apache Kafka Distribution. This is one of the parts of our global messaging solution named TIBCO Messaging and it is composed of several components:
- TIBCO Enterprise Message Service (aka TIBCO EMS) is our JMS 2.0 compliant server, one of our messaging standards over a decade.
- TIBCO FTL is our cloud-ready messaging solution, using a direct pub-sub no centralized and so performant communication system.
- TIBCO(R) Messaging — Apache Kafka Distribution is designed for efficient data distribution and stream processing with the ability to bridge Kafka applications to other TIBCO Messaging applications powered by TIBCO FTL(R), TIBCO eFTL(TM) or TIBCO Enterprise Message Service(TM).
- TIBCO(R) Messaging — Eclipse Mosquitto Distribution includes a lightweight MQTT broker and C library for MQTT client in the Core package and a component for bridging MQTT clients to TIBCO FTL applications in the Bridge package.
I’d like to do that post fully-technical but I’m going to let a piece of info about product version that you could find interesting, because we have a Community Edition of this whole Messaging solution and you could use yourself.
TIBCO Messaging software is available in a community edition and an enterprise edition.
TIBCO Messaging — Community Edition is ideal for getting started with TIBCO Messaging, for implementing application projects (including proof of concept efforts) for testing, and for deploying applications in a production environment. Although the community license limits the number of production processes, you can easily upgrade to the enterprise edition as your use of TIBCO Messaging expands. The community edition is available free of charge, with the following limitations and exclusions:
● Users may run up to 100 application instances or 1000 web/mobile instances in a production environment.
● Users do not have access to TIBCO Support, but you can use TIBCO Community as a resource (http://community.tibco.com).
TIBCO Messaging — Enterprise Edition is ideal for all application development projects, and for deploying and managing applications in an enterprise production environment. It includes all features presented in this documentation set, as well as access to TIBCO Support.
You can read that info here, but, please, take your time too to read our official announcement that you could find here.
So, this is going to be the first of a few posts about how to integration Kafka in the usual TIBCO ecosystem and different technologies. This series is going to assume that you already know about Apache Kafka, and if you don’t, please take a look at the following reference before moving forward:
- Apache Kafka Official Documentation: https://kafka.apache.org/documentation/
- Kafka Architecture: https://dzone.com/articles/kafka-architecture
So, now we are going to start installing this distribution in our machine, in my case I’m going to use UNIX based target, but you have this software available for MacOS X, Windows or whatever OS you’re using.
Installation process is quite simple because distribution is based on the most usual Linux distributions so it provides you a deb package, a rpm package or even a tar package so you can use whatever you need for your current distribution. In my case, as I’m using CentOS I’ve moved with the rpm package and everything goes so smooth.
And after that I have installed in my /opt/tibco folder a pretty much usual Kafka distribution, so to start it we need to start the zookeeper server first and then the kafka server itself. And that’s it. Everything is running!!
Mmmm.. But, How can I be sure of it? Kafka it doesn’t provide a GUI to monitor or monitor it, but there are a bunch of tools out there to do that. In my case I’m going to use Kafka Tool because it doesn’t need another components like Kafka REST and so on, but keep in mind there are other options with “prettier” UI but this is going to make the job just perfect.
So, after installing Kafka Tool, we only provide the data of where zookeeper is listening (if you keep everything by default, is going to be listening at 2181) and the Kafka version we’re using (in this case is 1.1), and now you can be sure everything is up & running and working as expected:
So, now we are going to do only a quick test using our flagship integration product TIBCO AMX BusinessWorks which has a Kafka plug-in, so you can communicate with this new server we just launched. This is going to be only a Hello World with the following structure:
- Process A is going to sent a Hello! to Process B.
- Process B is going to receive that message and print it in a log.
The process are going to be developed just like these:
And that’s the output we get after executing both processes:
And we can see that the topic sample we used to do the comunication and the default partition has been created by default using Kafka Tool:
As you can see, so easy and straightforward to have it all configured in a default way. After that, we continue going deep on this new component in the TIBCO world!
