I'm currently trying to add a generic serializer/deserializer to the kafka CDI library that allows producers and consumers to handle objects of type T. 

To test I've updated one of the kafka producers we've implemented to send records with key/value pairs of String/Variant types.

As far as I can tell the Serdes are actually being returned, but for some reason I cannot seem to grasp, the GenericSerializer class is being called again (not using the overlaoded constructor which is necessary to pass in the type of the object) and a NullPointerException is then thrown. 

Here is the updated producer: https://github.com/dimitraz/aerogear-unifiedpush-server/commit/cbc3b3da867fcef17ec419edee13a30d8c938dae

Here are the updates to the Kafka-cdi library with the serialiser changes: https://github.com/dimitraz/kafka-cdi/commit/09de7ff7c87120f242655253825e4efca186e518

Any help at all would be highly appreciated! 

Dimitra