Talend Jobs, Services, and Routes

Talend Open Studio for ESB provides the ability to create and deploy: Talend Jobs, Talend Services, and Talend Routes.

Talend Jobs allow you to produce services and implement complex logic to fulfill a wide range of integration requirements. Jobs can be developed that expose RESTful webservices, perform scheduled tasks, handle data migration jobs, poll databases, and so on. It is also where you implement the business requirements in the case of a SOAP web service created via Talend Services, and where complex operations that cannot be implemented in Routes are performed.

Talend Services provide the ability to create a traditional SOAP Web Service end-point. It provides tooling to handle WSDL files and constructs the SOAP services for you, allowing you to concentrate on implementing the actual requirements of the service. Talend Services call upon Talend Jobs to implement the actual requirements.

Talend Routes are geared towards web services and messaging system communications, and utilizes the features of Apache Camel as part of its feature set. There is a considerable overlap of capability when comparing Talend Routes and Talend Jobs, however, the more complex of tasks performed by Routes are usually implemented within the Jobs that it calls.

At first glance Jobs and Routes appear to produce similar outcomes, however, delving further, it becomes obvious that Talend Jobs provide a greater amount of flexibility and control over the process, particularly with its ability to include and use additional Java libraries and embed code directly within Job designs without having to switch between Routes and Jobs whenever complex operations are required. It's ability to operate as a one-off process, scheduled task or run indefinitely listening/acting on input (eg. webservice) also allows it to be applied for all manner of tasks. For these reasons we recommend solely using Jobs wherever possible.