Currently it is not possible to run an installed pear file out of the
box in UIMA. I mean by just specifying the pear installation path or
something similar.
To run installed pear files there is a lot of user configuration and
implementation necessary. So it would be nice to have a UIMA pear
runtime that can run an installed pear file out of the box.
With the suggestion of having custom resource specifiers
<customResourceSpecifier> we can provide an easy way to integrate such a
UIMA pear runtime.
We just have to implement a new PearAnalysisEngineWrapper that extends
the AnalysisEngineImplBase class that knows how to start an installed
pear file. All the necessary information is available and can be parsed
from the metadata of the installed pear. The utilities, e.g. to
dynamically load the classes (UIMA extension class loader) is also in
place and can be used. So an example of the <customResourceSpecifier>
can look like:
<customResourceSpecifier xmlns="http://uima.apache.org/resourceSpecifier";>
<resourceClassName>org.apache.PearAnalyisEngineWrapper</resourceClassName>
<parameters>
<parameter name="installedPear"
value="/path/to/the/root/directory/of/the/installed/pear/file"/>
<!-- and additional parameters if necessary -->
</parameters>
</customResourceSpecifier>
This solution will also work out of the box in our tooling. The tools
does not have to implement a PEAR runtime engine itself.
Do we have any limitations when implementing this approach?
Thoughts?
-- Michael
