First Release Candidate

This release adds a number of refactorings and abstractions in comparison to the original project:

• Remove coupling with the laravel framework.
• Add abstraction for failure handling: Before a failure would always be sent to a DLQ. Now the client is able to create custom failure handling logic by implementing the FailHandler interface.
• Create builder class to ease instantiation and configuration of consumers.
• Create abstraction for producing messages: This is the first step in turning this lib into a more generic kafka client.
• Simplify consumers: Previously, in order to consume messages, the client had to extend an abstract Consumer class. This has been removed, now the client only needs to provide a simple callable (handler) that receives the raw message.
• Create message decoder abstraction: A decoder is an object that receives the raw message and decodes it into a more useful data. The decoded message is passed as an argument to the handler. This allows the client to create a number of decoders and share this decoding logic across different handlers, making the handler implementation simpler. For a possible list of encoders:
  • A json decoder that parses json and returns stdClass (already implemented)
  • A json decoder that returns a deserialized object
  • An Avro decoder that returns a deserialized object
  • etc
• Create listener abstraction: The client can now respond to important events during consumer process and thus removes the need of logging logic in this client.