Use official avro js library?

[ethanresnick]

Hi! First of all, thank you for making this awesome library. I'm really excited to see the Kafka-/Avro-in-JS ecosystem getting fleshed out more w/ necessary building blocks like schema registry support. I looked through the implementation, and it seems like you've done a really nice job.

One thing I was wondering about, though, is whether you looked at the official Avro-in-JS implementation, and how it compares to the avsc package? I haven't done a deep dive on either of them, but it does seem like the official implementation is more complete (e.g., it supports recursive schemas, the uuid logical type, etc) and I assume it's probably? gonna be more complete and battle-tested than an implementation that's maintained by one developer outside of the apache foundation.

[felix-iw]

Hi! I decided for avsc for the following reasons:

• the module seems to be quite mature and well maintained, 156 version in 7 years
• avsc is well established, more than 200.000 downloads on npmjs per week
• I already used avsc in projects and it did work very well

avro-js on the other hand seems to be less popular, it has ~4700 downloads/week. And they created only 9 versions in 7 years.
From my understanding avsc also covers all avro features.
If you see a mismatch it would be good to have an example schema we can challenge the two solutions with.

[ethanresnick]

Hi! I definitely see that avsc is more popular, which can be a good proxy for quality. In terms of what it's missing though, there are a number of missing Avro features listed here. You'll notice that issue's been open for almost 3 years, which makes me wonder how well maintained avsc actually is. Among the missing features seem to be:

• Schemas w/ circular references
• Enum default values
• The uuid logical type
• Single object encoding (though, if I understand right, that isn't as needed when using a schema registry)

[felix-iw]

Hi! Thank again for bringing this up. I'm going to give avro-js a try.
The developer behind avsc is also an active maintainer of avro-js. I'm wondering how different the two implementations actually are.

[ethanresnick]

Cool! I didn’t know the same person was involved with both. I’m honestly just getting started with Avro in TS/JS, so I’ll be trying it out as well over the next week or so. We’ll see how it goes!