Some buzz came my way recently about Apache Pulsar, specifically Apache Pulsar hosted by StreamNative. Given that it has a free offering with no CC requirement, I decided to have a look. I’ll start by saying this blog post can’t possibly do it justice, but I’ll try to cover the basics at least. The documentation is reasonably good, and enough time spent going through them should get you the answers you need. I’ll walk through a simple application using Pulsar, and add some commentary at the end.

I chose to connect a Blazor WASM application to Pulsar, since that’s what most of my client apps will be. There’s a bit of disappointment there, since it’s not possible to connect the WASM client directly to Pulsar and thus avoid delays associated with proxying. Still, that’s a lot to ask for, so it’s not a huge deal. Proxying through the server API is more secure, anyway since credentials don’t have to be sent to the client side.

Create the application using dotnet new blazorwasm --hosted -n HelloPulsar -o HelloPulsar. Open the resulting solution file in your favourite IDE and clean it up by removing the Weather Forecast page, cleaning up navigation, etc. In the server component, add the Pulsar.Client NuGet package. This package is produced by the F# community, and attempts to mimic the Java API verbatim, as opposed to the official .NET client, DotPulsar, which doesn’t. Add the following initialization to Program.cs:

var pulsarClient = await pulsarBuilder
    .ServiceUrl("pulsar+ssl://<my-cluster>.<my-org-namespace>.snio.cloud:6651")
    .Authentication(AuthenticationFactoryOAuth2.ClientCredentials(
        new Uri("https://auth.streamnative.cloud/"),
        "urn:sn:pulsar:<my-namespace>:<my-instance>",
        new Uri("file:///path/to/my/keyfile.json")))
    .BuildAsync();
builder.Services.AddSingleton(pulsarClient);

This will add the PulsarClient singleton to the application to allow us to create producers. Note that the service account used for authentication must have producer access to the tenant, namespace, or topic.

Now, in a controller within the server API (say, PulsarController), create a method that says hello:

    [HttpPost("Hello")]
    public async Task<IActionResult> Hello([FromBody] string? name = "world")
    {
        var greeting = $"Hello, {name}!";
        var producer = await _pulsarClient.NewProducer(Schema.STRING())
            .Topic("persistent://public/default/hello")
            .CreateAsync(); 
        await producer.SendAsync(greeting);
        return Ok();
    }

This will send a greeting using the posted string to Pulsar. You will need to create the topic first in the StreamNative portal. You can verify that the message was received in the StreamNative portal by creating a subscription and peeking the message.

Ok, this works. But why would I want to choose it over Kafka? I can see some glimmers of why, and I’ll be keeping an eye on things to make a choice. The killer feature for me, I think, would be to use my own OAuth server for authentication. There’s some indication this is possible, though not yet with the StreamNative offering.

The community seems kind of small, and the StreamNative product rather minimal at present. On the other hand, if Pulsar offers more features (especially the custom OAuth server) it could be worth migrating new projects from Kafka. More to come…