Apache Hop 2.11 is available

4 min readDec 13, 2024

NOTE: this is a repost of a post on the know.bi blog.

After 2 months of work on well over 100 tickets, the Apache Hop community just released Apache Hop 2.11.0.

The recent Apache Hop releases put a lot of focus and effort on bug fixing and hardening. Even though a lot of the tickets worked on for the 2.11 release were bug fixes, this last release for 2024 breaks with that trend and comes with some spectacular new functionality.

NLP and LLM transforms

Tristan Everitt contributed four new NLP and LLM transforms to Apache Hop 2.11.0.

The Language Model Chat lets your data interact with various LLM chat engines. The supported engines are OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, Mistral and Hugging Face
The Stanford Simple NLP transform parses and tokenizes a body of text for basic text analysis. This transform includes support for 8 languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian and Spanish.
The Detect Language transform detects the language for a provided body of text from a field in your input stream. Check the docs for the (long) list of supported languages.
The HTML 2 Text transform extracts plain text from the HTML for a web page.

TIP: some of these transforms require libraries that are larger than what can be shipped with the default Apache Hop releases. Check the docs for download and installation instructions.

Git Improvements

The file explorer perspective has seen quite a bit of improvements in recent releases.

Apache Hop 2.11.0 comes with additional improvements to version control your projects in git without leaving Hop Gui.

Entirely new in 2.11.0 is the ability to work with branches: you can now create, switch, merge and delete branches, directly from the File Explorer perspective.

Syntax Highlighting

A new and improved syntax highlighting module was introduced in Apache Hop 2.11.0.

Syntax highlighting in SQL and scripting transforms and actions was removed shortly after the fork from Pentaho Data Integration to what is now Apache Hop, mainly because of its incompatibility with Hop Web.

Even though that incompatibility still applies to this new implementation, syntax highlighting was considered too useful to not have it in place.

This new syntax highlighting contains some improvements over the original implementations in the use of colors and keywords per language, the SQL highlighting also highlights the available tables and other database objects.

General & UI Improvements

Data grids have some fixes when adding/removing lines using the toolbar
The zoom in/out buttons in the main toolbar have been switched to more logical position (zoom out left, zoom in right)
Moving transforms/actions to the left boundary will no longer collapse them, and you can no longer move outside of the editable window
The viewport takes up less space on large workflows and pipelines. In previous versions, the viewport could grow unreasonably big in large pipelines and workflows. This is now limited to a maximum size.
The metadata perspective now contains a new REST metadata type. REST connections that were created there can now be reused in the REST client transform. This is the start of more REST improvements that will follow in future releases.
A new SingleStore (formerly MemSQL) database dialect was added. SingleStore primarily stores relational data, but can also work with JSON, graphs and time series data.
Lots of XML Cleanup (ongoing), in order to get rid of the legacy and hard-coded XML serialization and deserialization methods in the Apache Hop code. When done (about 70% now), Apache Hop will be able to read and write workflows and pipelines in other formats like JSON and YAML instead of XML as the only currently supported format.

Community

The Hop community continues to grow!

The overview below shows the community growth compared to the 2.10.0 release in October:

chat: 886 registered members (up from 867) join
LinkedIn: 2.545 followers (up from 2.262) follow
Twitter/X: 949 followers (unchanged from 949) follow
YouTube: 1.280 subscribers (up from 1.220) subscribe

know.bi and Apache Hop

know.bi has been committed to Apache Hop since the very early days, and will continue to contribute to and support Apache Hop.

Reach out if you want to find out more about Apache Hop, if you’d like to upgrade from PDI/Kettle or Talend, or if you’d like to discuss how we can help you build a successful data project or data platform with Apache Hop.

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