Although the producer side is quite simple to use and have more than one option available, the consumer side there is only one project that is "maintained" and works [1][2], all other opstions either only have producer available [3] or have not received a commit in years [4].
I am a bit disappointed about how little attention Node.js with kafka had so far as there are a lot of issues on keeping connection alive and rebalancing that made it really hard to trust the system and automate zero downtime deploys.
Although I still hope all these changes in 0.9 new consumer API solve these issues, I am really happy about the decision to be backwards compatible, making the transition/upgrade a much more smooth process
> To ensure a smooth upgrade paths for our users, the 0.8 producer and consumer clients will continue to work on an 0.9 Kafka cluster.
[1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/Clients#Cl...
[2] https://github.com/SOHU-Co/kafka-node/