Home
Developing
Learn about different Teracloud Streams tools and features to write, compile, run, and test streams applications.
Developing custom toolkits
Bundle and reuse custom functions and operators across several stream applications by creating custom toolkits.
Best practices
Use these tips to write conventional toolkits for better usability and maintainability.
Toolkit naming conventions
Toolkit names typically include a distinctive characteristic or common theme for all operators included in the toolkit.

Welcome
Learn about the core capabilities of Teracloud® Streams, its architecture, and key concepts.
Installing
Use this information to install, upgrade, and uninstall the Teracloud® Streams product.
Configuring
Create a basic or an enterprise domain which is a single point for configuring and managing common resources, security, and instances.
Administering
Administer the product by using the Teracloud® Streams graphical user interface, APIs, or the streamtool command-line interface.
Developing
Learn about different Teracloud Streams tools and features to write, compile, run, and test streams applications.
- Development concepts
  Development of stream applications consists of several components such as operators, streams, tuples, Streams Processing Language, toolkits, and more.
- Developing stream applications
  Try out tutorials and explore details about stream application development, SPL features, and best practices.
- Developing native functions
  Extend SPL's computational capabilities by creating native functions written in C++ or Java.
- Developing custom operators
  Create custom operators if shipped toolkits do not provide the necessary logic or behavior needed for your stream applications.
- Developing custom toolkits
  Bundle and reuse custom functions and operators across several stream applications by creating custom toolkits.
  - Toolkit directory files and structure
    Toolkit directories are structured identically to application directories. The only difference between the two is that toolkit directories do not contain any main composite operators.
  - Indexing a toolkit
    Index a toolkit to make its artifacts available for use in applications or other toolkits.
  - Packaging a toolkit
    Package a toolkit to allow other SPL application developers to access the operators and functions that are defined in the toolkit.
  - Installing a toolkit
    Custom toolkits can be installed by unpacking a packaged toolkit directory to a location on a file system.
  - Creating toolkit artifacts for use on multiple platforms
    Teracloud® Streams supports a varied set of hardware architectures and Linux™ distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). If you plan to deploy a toolkit on multiple platforms, you can create toolkit artifacts that simplify the management of the various C++ libraries. These examples show how to maintain a common infrastructure that works across multiple Linux distributions and hardware platforms.
  - Best practices
    Use these tips to write conventional toolkits for better usability and maintainability.
    - Toolkit naming conventions
      Toolkit names typically include a distinctive characteristic or common theme for all operators included in the toolkit.
    - Versioning guidelines
      Use a version scheme for toolkits that you develop. The toolkit version might be synced up with the version of a wrapped library, or it might depend on the feature set provided by the toolkit.
    - Documenting your SPL toolkits
      You can use SPLDOC markup and the spl-make-doc command to generate rich text documentation for your SPL toolkits.
- Working with files
  Applications and operators can read and write to files in several ways. If relative paths are used, the data directory is used as the root of relative paths. To enable logic to access the runtime application or toolkit directory hierarchies, language-specific functions can be used.
- Enabling Streams data exchange
  Teracloud® Streams provides a data exchange REST API for inserting and retrieving tuples within a job to easily integrate with other data services and external applications. Stream applications can enable the data exchange feature by using one or more Endpoint operators.
- Debugging stream applications
  Debug stream applications using the interactive, command line-based Streams Debugger (sdb).
Troubleshooting
Resolve problems with Teracloud® Streams using the troubleshooting tools provided with the product as well as the resources offered by Teracloud Support.
Reference
Find details on the SPL language, toolkits, APIs, commands, and more.
Glossary
Use this glossary to find terms and definitions for Teracloud® Streams.

Toolkit naming conventions

Toolkit names typically include a distinctive characteristic or common theme for all operators included in the toolkit.

Use the info.xml file to specify the name of the toolkit.

Follow these naming conventions for toolkit names:

Use lowercase letters.
Use a dot-separated sequence of characters, for example, com.teracloud.streams.db.
Precede the name of the toolkit with the reverse domain name used by the organization that authors it, for example, com.teracloud.streams.db. This practice helps avoiding name clashes among different toolkits.
Use the toolkit name as the name of the root directory where the toolkit is located.

Consider this toolkit information model that is included as a part of a database toolkit.

01: <toolkitInfoModel
02:  xmlns="http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/streams/spl/toolkitInfo"
03:  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
04:   xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/streams/spl/toolkitInfo toolkitInfoModel.xsd">
05:
06:   <identity>
07:     <name>com.teracloud.streams.db</name>
08:     <description>Database Adapters Toolkit</description>
09:     <version>1.0.0</version>     
10:     <requiredProductVersion>2.0</requiredProductVersion>
11:   </identity>
12:   <dependencies/>
13: </toolkitInfoModel>

The name of the toolkit (specified with the tag <name>) is com.teracloud.streams.db (line 7). The prefix com.teracloud.streams is common to all toolkits distributed with Teracloud® Streams, and the name db indicates that all operators in this toolkit are related to accessing databases.