In v5.5 of Confluent Platform the REST Proxy added new Admin API capabilities, including functionality to list, and create, topics on your cluster.
Check out the docs here and download Confluent Platform here. The REST proxy is Confluent Community Licenced.
When you run Kafka Connect in distributed mode it uses a Kafka topic to store the offset information for each connector. Because it’s just a Kafka topic, you can read that information using any consumer.
This shows how to use httpie with the Confluent REST Proxy.
echo '{"records":[{"value":{"foo":"bar"}}]}' | \
http POST http://localhost:8082/topics/jsontest \
Content-Type:application/vnd.kafka.json.v2+json Accept:application/vnd.kafka.v2+json