Wash away the CRUD with Kafka Streaming Part2
Tags: backend, tutorial
Published: 2019-04-11 19:34:14

---
title: Wash away the CRUD with Kafka Streaming Part2
published: true
description: An example of Kafka streaming for web applications.
tags: #backend, #tutorial 
---

## Kafka Streams with your web app.


![Pipelines](https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/www.sierraclub.org/files/styles/flexslider_full/public/sierra/articles/big/SIERRA%20Pipeline%20Sunset%20WB.jpg?itok=8WmuhW_d)

In the first post, we got Kafka set up and created a message producer to feed some employee data into our Kafka cluster. [Post1](https://dev.to/jbull328/wash-away-the-crud-with-kafka-streaming-3lik)

In this next one, we will create a consumer and a front end for our application with Express and Vue.js

For our web app to take advantage of the message system we need to create a consumer. We want our data to be available when a user gets to a certain page of our website, so we want to create a little express backend that will call the consumer into action when we want it.

```javascript
//server.js

const express = require("express");
const bodyParser = require("body-parser");
const cors = require("cors");
const GetMessage = require("./consumer");



const app = express();
app.use(express.static("public"));
app.use(bodyParser.json());
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }));
app.use(cors());

app.get("/api/employees", GetMessage);

app.listen(process.env.PORT || 3000, function() {
  console.log("Kafka Frontend Dev site running");
});
```
We are setting up one route that tells express to run the GetMessage function on our consumer.js file. So let's look at that file.

```javascript
//consumer.js
var kafka = require("kafka-node");

var express = require("express");
var router = express.Router();
var messageData = [];

const GetMessage = message => {
  var Consumer = kafka.Consumer;
  var data = [];
  const client = kafka.Client("localhost:2181");
  topics = [
    {
      topic: "employees"
    }
  ];
  const options = {
    autoCommit: true,
    fromBeginning: true
  };

```
Here are our setup and config options to connect to the server and connect to the topic employees.


```javascript

  var consumer = new kafka.Consumer(client, topics, options);
  this.message = message

  
   consumer.on("message", function(message, err) {
  
    if (err) {
      console.log(err);
    } else {
      console.log("Here is the kafka message... " + JSON.stringify(message));
      console.log(message.value);
      data.push(message.value);
     
    }
      if (message.event_data === "emp_chng_02") {
        console.log("A change happened for employee " + message.f_name + " " + message.l_name + ".")
      }
      messageData.push(data);
  });
  console.log(messageData)
}

GetMessage();
router.get("/api/employees", (req, res) => {
  messageData.forEach(function(message, error) {
    if (message) {
      res.send({key: message});
    } else if (error) {
      res.status(400).send("Error, something went wrong.");
    }
  });
});

module.exports = router;
```


Here we are creating the consumer and catching errors as well as running the getMessage function and sending each message we get to the express route. As long as we have our server.js file running in node we should see something when we navigate to localhost:3000/api/employees. We can start to see that we could use messages from Kafka in place of a query from a database as we would in a normal CRUD Express app.

![api data](https://res.cloudinary.com/jbull238/image/upload/v1555008609/Screenshot_from_2019-04-11_11-13-07_ncblqx.png)

Now let's have some fun and set up a little front end to display our results. I ended up using [create-vue-app](https://www.npmjs.com/package/create-vue-app) because I wanted something quick and easy.

```yarn global add create-vue-app```

```yarn create vue-app kafkaFrontend```

We should see these files.

```
├── README.md
├── index.ejs
├── package.json
├── poi.config.js
├── src
│   ├── components
│   │   ├── App.test.js
│   │   └── App.vue
│   ├── index.js
│   └── polyfills.js
├── static
│   └── favicon.ico
└── yarn.lock
```

We are going to want a component to display the employees. Our template displays a card for each employee and 

```javascript
//employees.vue
<template>
  <div class="main" id="app">
    
    <div class="card-container">
        <div class="employee-card" v-for="employee in employees">
        <div>{{employee.f_name }} {{employee.l_name}}</div> 
        <div>Hire date: {{employee.hire_date}}</div>  
        
      </div>
      
    </div>
  </div>
</template>


<script>
import axios from 'axios';


export default {
  name: "Employees",
  data() {
    return {
      employees: [],
      errors: [],
      
    };
  },
  
  created() {
    axios.get('http://localhost:3000/api/employees').then((response) => {
      let responseString = response.data.key
      responseString.forEach(element => {
        element = JSON.parse(element)
        console.log(element)
        if (element.event_id==="emp_chng_02") {
          this.employeesWithChanges.push(element)
        } else {
          this.employees.push(element)
        }
      });
      console.log(this.employees);
    })
    .catch(e => {
      this.errors.push(e)
    })
  },
  components: {
    
  }
  
  
};
</script>

 
 <!-- Scoped component css -->
 <!-- It only affect current component -->
 <style scoped>
.card-container {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: row;
  flex-wrap: wrap;

}

.employee-card {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  padding: 38px;
  width: 145px;
  height: 86px;
  max-width: 360px;
  margin: 40px;
  background: #fff;
  box-shadow: 0 1px 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.12), 0 1px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.24);
  transition: all 0.3s cubic-bezier(0.25, 0.8, 0.25, 1);
}

.employee-card:hover {
  box-shadow: 0 18px 32px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.25), 0 10px 10px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.22);
}

.alert {
  color: #FF4136;
  background: #001f3f;
  border: #001f3f;
}

</style>

```
In our App.vue file we will need to import our component.

```javascript
<template>
  <div id="app">
    <employees />
  </div>
</template>

<script>
import Employees from "./components/employees.vue";

export default {
  name: 'app',
  components: {
    Employees
  }
}
</script>
```

We will need to bring it into our index.js file as well.

```javascript
import Vue from "vue";
import Employees from "./components/employees.vue";
import { library } from '@fortawesome/fontawesome-svg-core'
import { faExclamationTriangle } from '@fortawesome/free-solid-svg-icons'
import { FontAwesomeIcon } from '@fortawesome/vue-fontawesome'


library.add(faExclamationTriangle)

Vue.component('font-awesome-icon', FontAwesomeIcon)


Vue.config.productionTip = false;

new Vue({
  el: '#app',
  render: h => h(Employees),
  data () {
    return {
      info: null
    }
  }
})
```


If we run the vue server from the console we should have the employees displayed when we go to the URL http://localhost:8080.
![employee site](https://res.cloudinary.com/jbull238/image/upload/v1555008600/Screenshot_from_2019-04-11_11-42-29_d0alrf.png)

Lastly, We will do something with our data by adding some event id's and seeing what happens.

[Part3](https://dev.to/jbull328/wash-away-the-crud-with-kafka-streaming-part3-36ac)