Important concepts in Talend Studio
8 Talend Open Studio for ESB User Guide
2.1. Important concepts in Talend Studio
When working with Talend Studio, you will often come across words such as repository, project, workspace, Job,
data service Job, Route, Service, component and item.
Understanding the concept behind each of these words is crucial to grasping the functionality of Talend Studio.
What is a repository? A repository is the storage location Talend Studio uses to gather data related to all of the
technical items that you use either to describe business models or to design Jobs.
What is a project? Projects are structured collections of technical items and their associated metadata. All of the
Jobs and business models you design are organized in Projects.
You can create as many projects as you need in a repository. For more information about projects, see Working
with projects.
What is a workspace? A workspace is the directory where you store all your project folders. You need to have
one workspace directory per connection (repository connection). Talend Studio enables you to connect to different
workspace directories, if you do not want to use the default one.
For more information about workspaces, see Working with different workspace directories.
What is a Job? A Job is a graphical design, of one or more components connected together, that allows you to set
up and run dataflow management processes. It translates business needs into code, routines and programs. Jobs
address all of the different sources and targets that you need for data integration processes and all other related
processes.
What is a data service Job? A data service Job is a graphical design, of one or more components connected
together, that allows you to set up and run data service processes. It translates business needs into code, routines
and programs. Jobs address all of the different sources and targets that you need for data integration processes
and combine it with Web services.
For detailed information about how to design data integration processes in Talend Studio, see Designing a Job.
Data service Jobs will simply be referred to as Jobs in the following documentation.
What is a Route? A camel Route is a graphical design, based on Apache Camel framework, of two or more
components connected together that allows you to set up and run routing and mediation rules. A routing rule
defines how messages will be moved from one service (or endpoint) to another.
What is a Service? A Service is a graphical design, of several WSDL objects (service, binding, port type and so
on) linked together, that allows you to set up and implement Web services. A Service is associated with one or
more data service Jobs as the service provider and can be consumed by consumer Jobs.
What is a component? A component is a preconfigured connector used to perform a specific data integration
operation, no matter what data sources you are integrating: databases, applications, flat files, Web services, etc.
A component can minimize the amount of hand-coding required to work on data from multiple, heterogeneous
sources.
Components are grouped in families according to their usage and displayed in the Palette of the Integration of
Talend Studio.
For detailed information about components types and what they can be used for, see Talend Open Studio
Components Reference Guide.
What is an item? An item is the fundamental technical unit in a project. Items are grouped, according to their types,
as: Job Design, Business model, Context, Code, Metadata, etc. One item can include other items. For example,