Fwd: MX4j support

cc users

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Federico Valeri <fedevaleri@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jul 14, 2025 at 2:09 PM
Subject: MX4j support
To: <dev@kafka.apache.org>


Hello devs, Kafka has support for MX4j, that can be used to expose JMX
beans over HTTP.

https://github.com/apache/kafka/blob/trunk/core/src/main/scala/kafka/server/KafkaRaftServer.scala#L91

This feature is not documented and disabled by default. To enable it,
you have to pass -Dkafka_mx4jenable=true and add the required JARs to
the classpath.

Activity on MX4J project has ceased and last release was 12/10/2006.
We have an 8 years old post on Kafka users ML asking if there is any
user, but no one replied.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MX4J
https://users.kafka.apache.narkive.com/4BMpuEMX/is-anyone-using-mx4j-loader

My question is: should we deprecate and remove? I guess that would
require a KIP.

I have some time to work on this if there is agreement.

Thanks
Fede