Graduation preparation
After the release of Hop 1.0 in early October, the Hop team started working towards the second major milestone: graduate Hop as an Apache Top Level project.
The graduation process is not complex but requires a number of steps and quite a bit of preparation and time. A lot of these steps require mailing lists discussions and voting rounds.
Even though Hop is not a top level project yet, we’re making good progress. Except some exciting news really soon!
Hop 1.1.0 preparation
Hop Server
A lot of work was done on Hop Server:
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Hop Server now allow asynchronous execution of long-running workflows
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the Get Server Status transform retrieves a lot of server and operating system metrics from one of your Hop Servers.
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Hop Server now supports defining a project or environment on startup
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Hop Server status can now be queried from the command line
Neo4j Graph Output
The Neo4j Graph Output saw a lot of work. Mostly of the improvements are under the cover improvements, but are offer a lot of new options to work with Hop in your Neo4j projects.
The Neo4j Graph Output transform now supports:
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self-relationships: relationship from a Node type to itself
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multiple relationships between 2 nodes
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models with multiple node labels
Lots and lots of bug fixes and improvements
There always are bugs to fix and things to improve. The Hop team worked on more than 160 tickets for the upcoming 1.1.0 release.
Some of the most important fixes and smaller improvements are:
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Hop Gui had some issues when working with large pipelines and workflows. These issues are fixed, and it now is a lot easier to navigate the gui in a large workflow or pipeline by simple mouse-wheel-dragging through the UI.
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the context dialog now uses keywords to search for transforms, actions and other metadata items.
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relational database transforms (e.g. table input, table output) now support variables for the connection name.
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Kafka consumer transform now shows sub-pipeline logs in main pipeline log
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CockroachDB as a new database type
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lots of small improvements on projects and environments
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lots of small improvements and support for additional transforms in metadata injection
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lots of documentation updates
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additional samples
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additional integration tests: Hop now runs close to 400 integration test workflows and pipelines. This growing test library helps us to build and maintain the best Hop releases possible.
New plugins
Transforms:
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Get Server Status: get Hop Server metrics (see Hop Server earlier)
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Standardize Phone Numbers: standardize phone numbers in your data. No more regex parsing required!
Apache Hop 2.0 preparation.
The Hop team is already looking past Hop 1.1.0 and towards Hop 2.0.
We created a separate branch with its own daily build to start working towards Hop 2.0 on Java 11.
It’s not a lot of fun to watch yet, the build still breaks, but there’s progress. We’re fixing issues with every build, and will eventually get there.
Community
Hop Mailing lists
Don’t forget to subscribe to our dev and users mailing lists! These mailing lists allow us to discuss and make decisions in a process that is as transparent and inclusive as possible, and as such are an important tool in our communication as an Apache project.
The dev and user lists currently only have 33 and 38 subscribers respectively. We can do better, Hop Community!
Subscribing is as easy as sending an empty email by clicking the links below:
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users: general how-to and functionality questions. Ask us anything!
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dev: developer discussions. There’s a lot of informal discussion going on in our chat channels, but decisions that matter are taken on the dev list!
3Hx - Hot Hop Hangouts
We had one hangout in November, and one in late October that wasn’t included in previous updates.
Check the events page for the full 3Hx schedule.
Hop Community
The Hop community continues to grow:
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 and Code of Conduct to find out more.
JIRA Activity
Here’s a quick overview of the 79 tickets the Hop community worked on in November
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Resolved: 40
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In Progress: 2
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Open: 35
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Closed: 2
The full list of issues that had activity over the last month is available here