I am trying to execute a sample producer consumer application using Apache Kafka. I downloaded it from https://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi?path=/kafka/0.10.0.0/kafka-0.10.
You've downloaded the source package. Download the binary package of Kafka and do testing.
You have to download the binary version from the official Kafka web site.
Assuming you have the correct binary version check to see that you do not already have CLASSPATH defined in your environment. If you do and the defined CLASSPATH has a space in it (e.g.C:\Program Files\<>) then neither zookeeper or kafka will start.
To solve this either delete your existing CLASSPATH or modify the startup script that builds the zookeeper and kafka CLASSPATH values, putting your CLASSPATH entry in double quotes before the path is built