title: Kafka Connect Api - Getting Started?
body: <p>I would like to understand the development life-cycle for Kafka connect modules.</p>
  
  <p>Following <a href="http://kafka.apache.org/090/documentation.html#connect" rel="nofollow">http://kafka.apache.org/090/documentation.html#connect</a>, I would like to write a custom Kafka connect module using the "connect api" but I dont know where to start. Are there any minimal examples of how to do this? Project setup etc? </p>
  
  <p>Incidentally I built this one <a href="https://github.com/confluentinc/kafka-connect-jdbc" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/confluentinc/kafka-connect-jdbc</a> and tried to run it (on google cloud) but i find errors - clearly a missing dependency but I dont know what to add. Of course it might be that this is only supposed to run on confluent platform. If it could run elsewhere then great. But if it cant, I would like to know how to build one from scratch hence my question.</p>
  
  <pre><code>java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/kafka/common/config/ConfigDef$Recommender
      at io.confluent.connect.jdbc.JdbcSourceConnector.start(JdbcSourceConnector.java:66)
      at org.apache.kafka.connect.runtime.Worker.addConnector(Worker.java:186)
      at org.apache.kafka.connect.runtime.standalone.StandaloneHerder.startConnector(StandaloneHerder.java:197)
      at org.apache.kafka.connect.runtime.standalone.StandaloneHerder.putConnectorConfig(StandaloneHerder.java:145)
      at org.apache.kafka.connect.cli.ConnectStandalone.main(ConnectStandalone.java:85) 
  
  Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.kafka.common.config.ConfigDef$Recommender
      at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:381)
      at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:424)
      at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:331)
      at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:357)
      ... 5 more
  </code></pre>