Pentaho® Kettle Solutions: Building Open Source ETL Solutions with Pentaho Data Integration

Chapter 23. Extending Kettle

The final chapter of this book will teach you how to get more out of your ETL solution and extend Kettle by developing your own plugins. None of the 34 ETL subsystems covers this, as it doesn't directly belong to the ETL solution. However, any plugin you develop will belong to one of the subsystems covered in this book, whether it is an extraction component for a proprietary data source or a plugin that generates documentation

As you must know by now, Kettle contains a rich set of building blocks like steps and job entries to help you solve complex problems. However, even with all the available functionality at your fingertips, at times you may find yourself in a situation that requires you to extend Kettle. Usually such extension is required to integrate Kettle with third-party or newly emerging technology.

We start by looking at the plugin architecture, the various types of plugins, and what makes it possible for Kettle to load plugins. Next, you learn how to set up your own development environment before we explain how you can develop new steps, job entries, partitioning methods, and so on. You get detailed explanations about the important classes and methods that are required in the various plugin types.

Plugin Architecture Overview

We start with an overview of the plugin capabilities of Kettle. You will learn what kind of plugins can be created and how they are loaded at run-time.

If you had to name the defining characteristics common and essential to ...