Learning Apache Apex

Visual development tools

The bottom of the stack use cases, such as simple data movement or basic ETL, can be addressed with visual development environments that come with the promise of building data processing pipelines without writing code. There have been products in this area for a long time; notable recent efforts include vendors such as StreamSets and Talend.

Often, it turns out that while initial, basic requirements can be met by such a tool, development soon bumps into the ceiling of functional limitation and lack of expressiveness. Development teams that originally did not want to write code ultimately find themselves maintaining a growing list of custom plugins or other custom code repositories.

An alternative that may offer a ...