Thanks for bringing this conversation up Eric.
Historically if you look over the last 5 years, I think what you are asking below has sort of already become the de facto truth. Most people are in fact using Tika server, whether they are individual devs, govvies, commercial folk and the like. Big, small and medium projects. Evidenced by the expansion of Tika APIs into pretty much every PL I know and use of actively today. Given that, we probably should update the main website docs to make this more prominent. The tika server docs on the wiki are pretty darn good. But they don’t get prime real estate. Would be wonderful if someone wants to update the website to make it more prominent. The downstream Tika Python lib that I maintain has tons of activity is used by more than 350+ projects and relies solely on Tika-Server. My recommendation to the Solr folks (having created 7633) from the 2014 DARPA MEMEX days was to move towards Tika Server based SolrCell dep and that’s the right way to go IMO. Chris From: Eric Pugh <[email protected]> Reply-To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Date: Wednesday, December 4, 2019 at 12:24 PM To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Subject: [EXTERNAL] Do we have a community supported approach for deploying Tika Server in production? Hi all - Hoping this is a reasonable Tika-dev versus Tika-user question! Over in Solr land there has been renewed discussion about streamlining what Solr is.... In regards to rich content extraction and the Tika project, it seems like the two ideas that continue to preserve the existing behavior are: 1) To convert the ExtractingRequestHandler into a Package (Plugin) for Solr. This slims down the standard Solr download, and *might* make it easier to update the version of Tika + dependent jars used? 2) The second approach is to instead require Tika-Server to be running (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-7633) and just have Solr delegate the call to Tika-Server. I was thinking about why I like option 1 better than 2, and I think it boils down to how mature the IT organization I am working with is. Some IT organizations have large dev-ops teams, and are working at major scale, and managing a fleet of Tika-Server on Kubernetes with Load Balancer dynamically scaling up and down is simple and second nature! However, many organizations aren’t like that. So I guess what I’m asking is do we have a reasonable supported approach for deploying Tika Server for non-tika savvy organizations? I’m thinking about Solr, and specifically the fact that Solr has a well defined set of Service Installation scripts. When I follow the directions in https://lucene.apache.org/solr/guide/8_3/taking-solr-to-production.html#taking-solr-to-production I can feel confident that when the server is rebooted, then Solr will come back up! Plus there is log rotation and all the rest. In contrast, when I look at Tika website, specifically https://tika.apache.org/1.22/gettingstarted.htm pagel, the message is to run Tika as a command line application, or embedded in your application. I’m wondering if Tika-Server needs to be made more prominent, and treated as the “primary method of interacting with Tika”? Do we need as a community to focus more on Tika-Server? In our getting started documentation, in our usage documentation, and in our examples? Do we need to create the equivalent of the Service Installation scripts for Tika-Server? Wanted to stoke the discussion! Eric _______________________ Eric Pugh | Founder & CEO | OpenSource Connections, LLC | 434.466.1467 | http://www.opensourceconnections.com <http://www.opensourceconnections.com/> | My Free/Busy <http://tinyurl.com/eric-cal> Co-Author: Apache Solr Enterprise Search Server, 3rd Ed <https://www.packtpub.com/big-data-and-business-intelligence/apache-solr-enterprise-search-server-third-edition-raw> This e-mail and all contents, including attachments, is considered to be Company Confidential unless explicitly stated otherwise, regardless of whether attachments are marked as such.
