Appendix B. Resources

The aim of this book is to give you an introduction to the Studio and its concepts, to start you on the path to developing integration jobs with ease. However, as your knowledge builds and your experience develops, you will want to know more about what the Studio can do for you. Fortunately, there are some fantastic resources available for developers of all skill levels.

In this appendix, we'll walk through some of the key additional resources you may use from time to time. Readers are very much encouraged to use them. We'll look at:

• The TalendForge Community forum

• The official Talend documentation

• Webinars and tutorials

• The Talend Exchange, where you can download open source components not included as standard in the Studio

Talend documentation

Talend provides excellent documentation and readers are encouraged to download and use this as they learn about developing with the Studio.

Talend provides:

• A prerequisites guide—the hardware and software requirements you will need to run the Studio

• A software installation guide

• A user guide, which introduces the concepts and principles of the studio tool

• A component reference guide, which provides information on each of the components in the Palette, with configuration guides and explanations of all of the configuration parameters

The component reference guide is particularly useful and is often a "go-to" document when developing jobs. It provides example uses for most of the components and illustrates how these examples are set up, giving developers a set of mini-tutorials to use for components that they are less familiar with.

Talend documentation can be downloaded from http://www.talend.com/download/data-integration .

TalendForge forum

You can find the official Talend forum at http://www.talendforge.org/ .

The TalendForge forum is a great community tool and will prove invaluable to new and experienced developers alike. Its format is pretty standard, with forum sections for each of Talend's developer tools—Talend Open Studio for Data Integration, Talend Open Studio for Data Quality, and so on—and each section has a number of subtopics, so you can choose the area most appropriate to your needs.

The Talend Open Studio for Data Integration is, by far, the most popular section and within this, there are some very active subsections covering installation and usage/operations.

The forum is completely open to browsers and there's a lot of useful information that you can gain by simply reading the queries and answers posted, but in order to get the most out of the forum it is recommended that you register and create a user account. Registered users can post and respond to new topics.

Take a quick look at the Usage, Operation subsection. A lot of the topics are of the form "How do I do.....?". You can see that the topics are widely read and often get lots of answers, both from community members and Talend employees, and this is a great place to come when you are stuck on a development task.

Webinars

Talend offers both live and on-demand webinars and these can be accessed at http://www.talend.com/resources/webinars .

The on-demand webinars are recordings of previous live webinars and there's a wide range of topics to view from basic integration techniques to "big data" analytics.

You can create a user account at www.talend.com and sign-up for their regular e-mail communications.

You will be notified by an e-mail when live webinars are due to take place and you simply need a browser and Internet connection to be able to view. The live webinars are often interactive, giving viewers the opportunity to ask questions related to the topic under discussion.

Tutorials

There are a number of worked example tutorials on the TalendForge site and these can be found at http://www.talendforge.org/tutorials/menu.php .

There are three easy tutorials that detail some basic techniques, followed by some more detailed, complex examples. Note that some of the tutorials refer to Talend Enterprise Data Integration, which is an enterprise version of the Studio. Although the functionalities are very similar, the enterprise version offers some features that are not available in Talend Open Studio. As a result, there are some tutorials that you will not be able to complete with Talend Open Studio alone.

Additionally, Talend has a channel on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/TalendChannel.

The instructional videos within the channel are really designed for marketing purposes and are not step-by-step tutorials, but, nonetheless, serve as a good introduction to using Talend in different scenarios.

Talend Exchange

The Studio comes with over 600 built-in connectors and components, but the open nature of the Studio has allowed developers to create their components and made them available to the community. Sometimes, these components get adopted by Talend and make it into the standard Studio product, but others are available for developers to download and use, even though they do not have the "official" stamp of approval.

New components can be downloaded straight into the Studio tool. Follow the given steps to get connected:

1. In the Studio tool, go to Windows | Preferences. The Preferences dialog box will open.

   

2. In the search box at the top left, type exchange and press Enter. This will reveal the Exchange configuration window.

3. Click on the Sign In button to display the TalendForge login window.

   

4. On the login window, you can sign in (if you already have an existing TalendForge account) or create a new account.

5. Once you have signed in, you will see your account name in the Exchange Preferences window.

   

6. Click on OK to complete the Exchange setup.

7. Having completed the setup, click on Exchange in the menu bar.

   

8. This will reveal the Exchange search window, where you can browse or search for components.

   

9. Let's install a component for Apache's Solr Search Platform (http://lucene.apache.org/solr/). Enter solr in the search box and click on the search icon to the right of the textbox.

10. A number of Solr components will be returned. Let's install a tSolrConnection component. Click on View/Download.

11. You'll see some more details about the component. Click on Install to download the component. Once complete you'll get a success notification. You will now be able to search for the component in the Palette and add it to your integration jobs in the normal manner.