Version 1.4.0 (2015-05-01)

New Features:

• The consumer now implements Topics() and Partitions() methods to enable
  users to dynamically choose what topics/partitions to consume without
  instantiating a full client
  (#431).
• The partition-consumer now exposes the high water mark offset value returned
  by the broker via the HighWaterMarkOffset() method (#339).
• Added a kafka-console-consumer tool capable of handling multiple
  partitions, and deprecated the now-obsolete kafka-console-partitionConsumer
  (#439,
  #442).

Improvements:

• The producer's logging during retry scenarios is more consistent, more
  useful, and slightly less verbose
  (#429).
• The client now shuffles its initial list of seed brokers in order to prevent
  thundering herd on the first broker in the list
  (#441).

Bug Fixes:

• The producer now correctly manages its state if retries occur when it is
  shutting down, fixing several instances of confusing behaviour and at least
  one potential deadlock (#419).
• The consumer now handles messages for different partitions asynchronously,
  making it much more resilient to specific user code ordering
  (#325).