Geo-enabling Apache Hop

Stefan Ziegler has been geo-enabling the open-source #ETL tool #ApacheHop, building #GDAL/#OGR reader and writer plug-ins and adding an interactive preview for geometries: Early days, but promising progress toward a fully geo-capable data integration pipeline tool.
Author

Ralph Straumann

Published

March 10, 2026

Apache Hop is an open-source ETL1 solution (previously here and here, if you followed along) that – in its own words and certainly in the hopes of some stakeholders – “aims to be the future of data integration.” Hop workflows and pipelines can be assembled through a graphical user interface using drag-and-drop. This makes it a potential replacement for similar tools in that space.

Over the last few days, Stefan Ziegler, head of the Office for Geoinformation and cantonal surveyor of the canton of Solothurn, has taken a stab at (further) geo-enabling Apache Hop. So far, he published two blog posts (both in German):

Let’s Hop2 #1: Laying the foundation

In this first post, Stefan describes how he implemented both an Apache Hop OGR reader and writer3 by building Java bindings for GDAL/OGR and packaging everything into Hop plug-ins. This re-uses previous work by AtolCD and their geospatial plug-ins for Hop.

GDAL/OGR reader and writer plug-ins in Apache Hop (source: Stefan Ziegler)

Let’s Hop #2: Die Idee ist gut, die Vorschau ist besser

In this second post, Stefan explains how he implemented a geospatial preview for the native geometry data type in Hop. Rather than just displaying the geometry as EWKT4, Stefan’s “Inspect geometries…” plug-in allows users to look at geospatial features in Hop in their spatial context using an interactive map.

Geospatial preview in Apache Hop (source: Stefan Ziegler)

Great stuff! Still early days, but let’s hope5.

Footnotes

  1. Extract-transform-load.↩︎

  2. Not my pun, but Stefan’s 🫣↩︎

  3. Technically, ogr-reader and ogr-exporter.↩︎

  4. Extended Well-Known Text, a PostGIS extension of WKT that includes the spatial reference system identifier (SRID) of the encoded geometry.↩︎

  5. Yeah, my bad 😬↩︎