Major Description
Currently, the new java clients take a byte array for both the key and the value. While this api is simple, it pushes the serialization/deserialization logic into the application. This makes it hard to reason about what type of data flows through Kafka and also makes it hard to share an implementation of the serializer/deserializer. For example, to support Avro, the serialization logic could be quite involved since it might need to register the Avro schema in some remote registry and maintain a schema cache locally, etc. Without a serialization api, it's impossible to share such an implementation so that people can easily reuse.