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title: Implementing a Bolt

{{< alert “spouts-and-bolts” >}}

Bolts must implement the IBolt interface.

public interface IBolt extends Serializable {
  void prepare(Map<String, Object> heronConf, TopologyContext context, OutputCollector collector);
  void execute(Tuple input);
  void cleanup();
}

• The prepare method is called when the bolt is first initialized and provides the bolt with the executing environment.

• The execute method is called to process a single input Tuple. The Tuple contains metadata about component/stream/task it comes from. And OutputCollector is used to emit the result.

• The cleanup method is called before the bolt is shutdown. There's no guarantee that this method is called due to how the instance is killed.

See ExclamationBolt for a simple bolt example.

Instead of implementing the IBolt interface directly, you can implement IRichBolt.