Roundup January 2021

Roundup January 2021

As always at the start of another new month, let’s have a look at what happened at Hop over the last month. Here’s the recap for January 2021!

Apache Hop (Incubating) 0.60 Released

Apache Hop (Incubating) 0.60 was released in late January.

With 0.60 being the first Hop release as an Incubating ASF project, we focused on adopting the “Apache Way”, and made this a source code only release.

Check all details in the release announcement.

Since the release of 0.60, the last license incompatibilities have been resolved: all non-compliant source code has been cleanup up or removed, Hop is now 100% ASF compliant.

Password Encoding

Metadata password encoding has now been made pluggable and is synced with the rest of the Hop platform with the AES, target=“blank” (Advanced Encryption Standard) passwords implementation as a first plugin.

Translation improvements

Having Hop available in one’s native language significantly improves developer productivity. That is why we introduced the Hop Translator tool very early after Hop’s introduction, and have now simplified the process of adding and translating i18n keys for developers and translators.

Developers can now specify i18n keys as i18n:package:key, for example in the annotation below:

@GuiMenuElement(
      root = ID_MAIN_MENU,
      id = ID_MAIN_MENU_FILE,
      label = "i18n::HopGui.Menu.File",
      parentId = ID_MAIN_MENU)

Check the internationalisation documentation, target=“blank” for more details.

On that page, you’ll also find information about the Translator’s use. Check the translation contributor guide to check how you can start contributing translations in your native language.

New Plugins

The list of available plugins in Hop keeps growing. Thanks Matt, Nicolas and Sergio for January’s batch of new plugins:

• Action(s):
  • AS400 command
• Passwords (see up):
  • AES Two Way Password Encoder
• Transforms:
  • Enhanced JSON Output
  • Metadata structure of stream

Kettle/PDI Importer

From the start in late 2019, Hop’s goal was to be an independent platform. Hop started from the Kettle/PDI 8.2.0.7 code base, but both platforms have moved in different directions and are not compatible.

Users and developers who want to migrate their Kettle/PDI projects to Hop are now one File -> Import from Kettle/PDI click away from doing so. Specify your Kettle/PDI jobs and transformations folder, a Hop project or folder to import to, and you’re done. Optionally, kettle.properties, shared.xml and simple-jndi’s jdbc.properties can be imported to Hop variables and relational database connections as well.

Check the documentation for more details and don’t forget to create a JIRA ticket if you find any issues.

Various

Continued L&F improvements

We’ve continued to tweak Hop Gui’s look and feel, among other things with improved icons resolution on Mac.

Project improvements

We continue to work on project and environment improvements. After lengthy discussions on the chat ~dev channel and on the mailing list, we made a couple of changes. Projects are now optional, have a default and can inherit from other projects.

Community

The Hop community continues to grow:

• chat: 134 registered members (up from 122) join
• LinkedIn: 375 followers (up from 321) follow
• Twitter: 291 followers (up from 250) follow
• YouTube: 68 subscribers (up from 50) subscribe

Check out the complete list of committers and contributors.

Without community contribution, Hop is just a coding club! Please feel free to join, participate in the discussion, test, file bug tickets on the software or documentation, … Contributing is a lot more than writing code.

Check out our contribution guides to find out more.

JIRA Tickets

The full list of issues that had activity over the last month is:

Resolved (71)

In Progress (7)

Open (42)

Closed (6)