Getting Started with Talend Open Studio for Data Integration: This is the complete course for anybody who wants to get to grips with Talend Open Studio for Data Integration. From the basics of transferring data to complex integration processes, it will give you a head start.

Let's start with a few definitions to make everything clear:

We will create each of these as we work through the chapter.

The Studio is a cross-platform development tool and supports Windows, Linux, and Mac OS in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. To start the Studio, go to the directory where the Studio was installed, and double-click on the executable appropriate for your operating system.

Let's look at the Studio environment. To help illustrate the different windows and views of the Studio tool, we will open a job from the demo project.

In the left-hand column of the Studio tool, we will see the Repository window. The Repository contains all of the artifacts associated with a project—Job Designs, Business Models, Metadata, and so on—as shown in the following screenshot:

Expand the Job Designs section of the Repository and double-click on the job named priorTest 0.1. This will open the priorTest job as shown in the following screenshot:

Let's now create a new project, which we will use as a container for all of the example jobs illustrated in later chapters of the book.

Start the Studio (or if it is already open, go to File | Switch Project) and wait for the logon screen to appear. We will see our demo project in the list of projects but we won't open this project; instead, we'll create a new one. Click on the Create button as shown in the following screenshot:

You will be prompted to enter a project name. Enter BEGINNERSGUIDE, optionally adding a project description if you wish, and click on the Finish button. You'll now see the new project in the project list. Highlight the BEGINNERSGUIDE project and click on the Open button.

Once the Studio is open, we will see the standard Studio layout as described previously. Let's create a simple job to illustrate the development process and give you some hands-on experience with the Studio.

The Studio helpfully describes the development process for you on the default design workspace window.

The basic process is as follows:

Simple, right?

In the time-honored tradition of programming books, our first job will be a simple "hello world" job. Follow the given steps:

For the final part of this chapter, let's look at how the Studio uses "metadata". Metadata is defined as "data about data". It describes the data, but isn't the data itself. In the Studio context, metadata refers to reusable configurations that describe the data, its attributes, or its containers. For example, we could define metadata in the Studio that describes an XML schema, a web service definition, or an FTP connection. Once defined, these configurations can be used across multiple Studio jobs.

The benefit of metadata components is that they save developers time as they are defined once and used many times. They also provide a single place to update configurations for many jobs. For example, if the password to an FTP account changes and this FTP connection is used in 10 different jobs, the details would have to be updated 10 times. However, if you store this configuration in a single metadata component, it only needs to be updated once.

Let's work through an example of metadata...

In this chapter, we looked at the Studio working environment and introduced some of the standard tasks you will undertake as a developer, such as creating projects, jobs, and metadata. We created a "Hello World" job that illustrated a simple development process and executed the job to see how the Studio presents its results.

In the next chapter, we will get truly hands on with the Studio and create some jobs that transform data files.