[agacera]

Confluent only officially supports the Java client (and now has a Python, Go and .Net clients as well that I didn't know) and it is really recommended to use the client with the same version of broker due to protocol incompatibilities.

Most Kafka client implementations are open-source projects of their own, this is also true for most redis clients implementations, but again: Kafka protocol is much more complicated than Redis.

I haven't used Kafka with other languages besides Java or Scala, so I can't really say how mature are the other clients.

But my point about how easy is to implement a client for Redis if needed is still valid. =)

[kasey_junk]

They also support a c reference implementation (which is how they get others).