Step-by-step, Talend helps you build your integration flows
September 19, 2016
Step-by-step, Talend helps you build your integration flows
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Talend Open Studio
I used Talend Open Studio to implement integration processes. In one advanced use case, I used it to retrieve employee details via multiple web service methods and combine that data with other sources with the goal of providing required data to the payroll system to complete the onboarding of employees. In another use case, I queried pricing daily data of commodities via a web service method call to provide historical pricing data and visualization of the multi-year pricing histories.
- Talend provides pre-built widgets to integrate with databases, web services, and FTP for example, which saves time and quality issues in building basic functionalities that are needed to create a full workflow.
- Using any tool, such as Talend, encourages a consistent mindset and approach for processing steps, rather than being 100% free-form logic based on the mood of the developer. This makes it easier to understand the workflow that is implemented, even if you are working with many different processes.
- Using Talend allowed me to work on a project to the point where the client needed to review it, pause development for a week or even 3 weeks if key people were very busy, and to resume work without much trouble at all. If I had been developing without such a tool, my custom code base would have been much larger, and I would have had more difficulty resuming work after such a break.
- Standard source control practices do not work the way you would expect them to when using Talend. The intermediate items that Talend creates in the workspace are not simply a set of .java files, so you must take extra care of managing your workspace directory. This means you must backup your entire workspace directory prior to upgrading the version of Talend you are using for active development. Granted, we should do this even when upgrading a basic Eclipse environment, but it is far easier to get back where you started if Eclipse gets messed up, than if Talend gets corrupted somehow. This is a key concern for developers, and gaining comfort with this is a matter of time committment to a single tool, which developers are hesitant to commit. There are options to help this in the team and enterprise versions of the tool, but those have their own barriers to adoption, money and agreement across a development team.
- It could take 2-3 weeks for an seasoned Java developer to gain comfort in how to best implement processes using Talend. It is worth it if you have a lot of projects that start, go on back-burner, then resume, or if you are switching between integration processes and wanting a standard way to build your programs
- I delivered projects the client did not believe were possible, and I provided intermediate value by providing visibility to hidden data problems in their systems they could not detect before.
- I was able to work 3 projects at a time, pausing gracefully in one while switching to the other, with minimal effort.
It solved my specific problem of needing a standard way to integrate with databases, web services and file transfers. The price is right (free). And the tool has been very stable in my experience.