UIMA-AS best practices?

[Jens Grivolla]

Hi,

we're getting started with UIMA-AS, having the AS components deployed on 
currently only one server, and a web interface using SimpleUimaAsService 
in order to call the service from different clients (using Python, 
directly from Solr, etc.).

So far it is working, but we need to improve our deployment method. 
Currently we start the broker by hand, and then have shell scripts for 
each component to configure the class path and run it.

What are the current best practices in order to have the broker reliably 
up and running, register a list of components automatically and monitor 
that they are all functioning?

Also, if it were possible to point to PEAR descriptors for AS components 
it would ease deployment considerably because we would not have to deal 
with manually setting the class path for each component. UIMA-1482 says 
"defer to after 2.3.0 release" which is quite a while ago, and still 
unassigned. Unfortunately, fixing this probably goes quite a bit beyond 
my knowledge of UIMA.

Thanks,
Jens