All,
I am developing an application, which use alpakka spring boot integration to read data from kafka. I have most of the code ready, the only place i am stuck is how to initialize a continuous running stream, as this is going to be a backend application and wont be having any api to be called from ?
As far as I know, Alpakka's Spring integration is basically designed around exposing Akka Streams via a Spring HTTP controller. So I'm not sure what purpose bringing Spring into this serves, since there's quite an impedance mismatch between the way an Akka application will tend to like to work and the way a Spring application will tend to like to work.
Assuming you're talking about using Alpakka Kafka, the most idiomatic thing to do would be to just start a stream fed by an Alpakka Kafka Source in your main method and it will run until killed or it fails. You may want to use a RestartSource around the consumer and business logic to ensure that in the event of failure the stream restarts (note that one should generally expect messages for which the offset commit hadn't happened to be processed again, as Kafka in typical cases can only guarantee at-least-once processing).