Spatial Hop

Stefan Ziegler has released a new version of his spatial #Hop distribution, swapping the heavy #OGR/#GDAL dependency for a pure-Java GeoTools-based approach and adding dedicated #INTERLIS support. Fewer formats are supported overall, but the essentials (#Shapefile, #GeoPackage, #FGDB, #FlatGeobuf, #GeoParquet) are covered, alongside an improved Data Inspector.
Author

Ralph Straumann

Published

September 23, 2026

The Apache Hop horse has come a long way (source: Stefan Ziegler)

News from Apache Hop in the geospatial domain (Spatial Hop? SHop? SHOP?):

At hop.interlis.guru, Stefan Ziegler has published a new Apache Hop version1 under the monicker “Spatial tools and plugins for Apache Hop” with the tagline “Apache Hop with spatial plugins already included. Read, transform and write geospatial data in visual pipelines.” This is pretty much the most concise description of this new Hop version.

The announcement post by Stefan has a few more details:

The geodata import and export functionalities have received a major update: […] a ‘pure Java’ approach using Geotools and my own code. This means I can do without the ‘heavy’ OGR/GDAL plugin. […]

Naturally, far fewer formats are supported, but the most important ones are included: Shapefile, GeoPackage and File Geodatabase. For export only, FlatGeobuf, (Geo-)Parquet and Arc Generate are supported. The most important format of all (INTERLIS2) receives special treatment in the form of a dedicated plugin (à la ili2fme). Furthermore, with the ili2db plugin, you can always import or export INTERLIS to and from PostgreSQL and GeoPackage. […]

The Geometry Inspector is increasingly becoming a Data Inspector. It can now display multiple streams and supports an initial form of caching (for some transformers).

I wonder how much steam3 is left in Stefan’s Hop development effort. Two is one and one is none.

In any case: Interesting stuff. The prepared examples and sample data should help curious people find their footing and test Spatial Hop for their workflows.

Greek Hoplites (Wikipedia): Not seen in real life for quite a while. A bit awkward: They are sometimes depicted fighting cavalry.

Footnotes

  1. Thanks to open-source.↩︎

  2. INTERLIS is a Swiss standard for geodata modelling and data exchange.↩︎

  3. Tokens?↩︎