Kafka Streams: Turning Data at REST to Data in Motion

This post details the implementation of a near-real-time flight tracking dashboard using Kafka Streams. It describes how a Kafka producer was built to poll data from a REST API of international flight systems, transforming and enriching this data into Kafka topics. The Kafka Streams application then processes these events to perform aggregations (e.g., flights per airline, fastest flights) within 30-second windows, producing aggregated streams for visualization. The architecture decouples components using Kafka and utilizes WebSockets for streaming processed data to a Vue.js-based progressive web app.