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A plugin is a customizable module, exposed and used by an application template. It simplifies adding new features or extending the capability of an application. Plugin implementations are based on interfaces exposed by the application templates. Currently, CDAP data pipeline application templates expose Source, Transform, and Sink interfaces, which have multiple implementations. Future Application Templates will expose more plugins such as Compute, Arbitrary MR, and Spark in addition to those mentioned above.
Artifact
An artifact is a versioned packaging format used to aggregate applications, custom datasets, and plugins along with associated metadata. It is a JAR (Java Archive) containing Java classes and resources.
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The application templates, ETL Batch, Data Pipeline - Batch , and ETL Real-time, Data Pipeline - Realtime (which uses Spark Streaming) are available by default from within the Pipeline Studio. Additional application templates, such as Data Pipeline Real-time and Spark Streaming, are being added in upcoming releases.
The ETL Batch and ETL Real-time application templates expose three plugin types: source, transform, and sink. The Data Pipeline Batch application template exposes three additional plugin types: aggregate, compute, and model. Additional plugin types can be created and will be added in upcoming releases.
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