Splunk Delivers Eclipse Plug-In

Splunk, a provider of a popular big data analytics platform for real-time operational intelligence, has announced new developer features, including a plug-in for Eclipse. Developers can use the new Splunk Plug-in for Eclipse for building applications that use and extend Splunk, Jon Rooney, director of developer marketing, told eWEEK.

“Our customers are a lot of big enterprises with a lot of Java shops, so we’re shipping an Eclipse SDK,” Rooney said.

Search and automation

Eclipse is the tool of choice for a majority of Java developers around the world. The new plug-in contains a project template for building a new Splunk software development kit (SDK) for Java application.

It can be used for building an application that searches against Splunk data or does automation. The project template includes snippets for performing common SDK tasks, as well as infrastructure for wiring up the application to log application data directly to Splunk using popular log frameworks like Apache Log4J.

Additionally, the plug-in includes support for creating modular inputs to extend Splunk and allow it to talk to additional data sources such as other internal systems or public APIs like Google, Facebook and Twitter.

In addition to the Splunk Eclipse plug-in, the company also has delivered an update to the Splunk SDK for Python that supports extensibility for the fundamental activity in Splunk: search.

Complex algorithms

Developers can use the custom search functionality in the updated Splunk SDK for Python to author new search commands. This makes it easy for developers to extend Splunk’s search language and introduce their own commands that can be used on the command line, Rooney said.

This can be used either for introducing complex algorithms like doing geo-fencing, or linear regression, for retrieving data from public APIs – such as Amazon’s S3 or Azure Blob Storage, or for addressing domain-specific concerns like retrieving data from an internal system or applying custom business logic on top of Splunk data.

Splunk also commissioned RedMonk analyst Donnie Berkholz to talk with Splunk customers and partners about how they use Splunk software in the software development in a new video.

After its annual user conference last October, Splunk in November named Todd Papaioannou as its new CTO. Papaioannou joined Splunk from Data Collective Venture Capital (DCVC), a venture capital firm where he was an entrepreneur-in-residence. Prior to DCVC, he was co-founder and chief executive of Continuuity, an early stage big data startup. Before that he worked on Hadoop at Yahoo.

Papaioannou is engaged with developers and big data technology, Rooney said. He will be speaking at the upcoming Fluent 2014 conference in San Francisco in March where he will address the developer audience about building big data applications.

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Originally published on eWeek.