[ANNOUNCE] Release Apache Hop 2.4.0

[Bart Maertens <ba...@apache.org>]

The Apache Hop PMC and community are pleased to announce the general
availability of Apache Hop 2.4.0.
This 2.4.0 release is the result of a massive effort by the Apache Hop
community and contains two months of work on 98 tickets.

The Hop Orchestration Platform, or Apache Hop, aims to facilitate all
aspects of data and metadata orchestration.
Hop is an open source data integration platform that is easy to use,
fast and flexible.
Hop aims to be the future of data integration. Visual development
enables developers to be more productive than they can be through
code. Our Design once, run anywhere workflows and pipelines can be
designed in the Hop Gui and run on the Hop native engine (local or
remote), or on Spark, Flink, Google Dataflow or AWS EMR through Beam.
Lifecycle Management enables developers and administrators to switch
between projects, environments and purposes without leaving your train
of thought.

A number of highlights in the 2.4.0 release are:

* DuckDB as a new supported database
* a new JSR-223 Script transform
* a new Data Validator transform
* lots of new and updated documentation and samples
* lots of bug fixes
* community growth

The release is available for immediate download at:

https://hop.apache.org/download/

For more details please take a look at the release announcement at:

https://hop.apache.org/blog/2023/03/hop-2.4.0/

Thanks to all involved,
Bart Maertens on behalf of the Apache Hop PMC