Hop is a fork of the well-known Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) tool. It also uses XML files as the file format, but some of the tags have been renamed. Also, Hop is completely metadata driven and so what in PDI was contained inside the transformation or job file (now called pipeline and workflow) is now externalized into metadata files.
One other important new aspect of Hop is that it supports handling different environments. The idea is that you have your metadata apart from the implementation and you can use a pipeline or workflow unchanged in you swap the environment. Such as e.g. changing from QA to Prod.
Now the PDI and the Hop tool have a lot in common: the file format and the idea of plugins or steps, the GUI to create the workflows and pipelines and more. PDI has been is use by companies for many years and it has a strong user community.
So a tool to convert files from the PDI tool to the new Hop tool is required. It has been given the name "ultimate tool". The meaning of ultimate here does not refer to the "best" tool" but really means that it will be a tool that can convert and transform ETL flows, pipelines or however they are called, from various different tools into the equivalent Hop format.
An initial version is available. It focusses on basic functionality and supports the conversion of PDI .ktr and .kjb files. Using the tool you will be able to convert all files in a given folder or multiple single files into the Hop file format. For more details please read here: github.com/uwegeercken/hop-uit
When you do a "maven clean install", you get all required files to run the program in the "target" folder. Change the file permissions to executable on the hop-uit.sh script. Then I would recommend, that you create a folder and copy all PDI .ktr and .kjb files you want to have converted into it. Now you are ready to run the script:
If you only want to convert one file or a few files, you can specify the input folder and then one or multiple single files, like this:
Here is an example of a very simple .ktr transformation file in Pentaho PDI:
Next blog post will look at more details and how the tool handles Hop environments.
Carpe Diem.