<li>The <ahref="#producerapi">Producer</a> API allows applications to send streams of data to topics in the Kafka cluster.
<li>The <ahref="#consumerapi">Consumer</a> API allows applications to read streams of data from topics in the Kafka cluster.
<li>The <ahref="#streamsapi">Streams</a> API allows transforming streams of data from input topics to output topics.
<li>The <ahref="#connectapi">Connect</a> API allows implementing connectors that continually pull from some source system or application into Kafka or push from Kafka into some sink system or application.
Kafka exposes all its functionality over a language independent protocol which has clients available in many programming languages. However only the Java clients are maintained as part of the main Kafka project, the others are available as independent open source projects. A list of non-Java clients is available <ahref="https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/Clients">here</a>.
When using Scala you may optionally include the <code>kafka-streams-scala</code> library. Additional documentation on using the Kafka Streams DSL for Scala is available <ahref="/{{version}}/documentation/streams/developer-guide/dsl-api.html#scala-dsl">in the developer guide</a>.
The Connect API allows implementing connectors that continually pull from some source data system into Kafka or push from Kafka into some sink data system.
<p>
Many users of Connect won't need to use this API directly, though, they can use pre-built connectors without needing to write any code. Additional information on using Connect is available <ahref="/documentation.html#connect">here</a>.
Those who want to implement custom connectors can see the <ahref="/{{version}}/javadoc/index.html?org/apache/kafka/connect"title="Kafka {{dotVersion}} Javadoc">javadoc</a>.
For more information about the AdminClient APIs, see the <ahref="/{{version}}/javadoc/index.html?org/apache/kafka/clients/admin/AdminClient.html"title="Kafka {{dotVersion}} Javadoc">javadoc</a>.