I am currently developing a Tomcat application that wraps around Uima to run text mining processes. I am confused over what PEAR can be used for and how it can be used in a Uima- wrapped application.
The application is to be deployed as a installed web application at our client's location and it is meant to be more or less a black box to our client. That is, our client should not need to know about the intricracies of Uima or the various analysis engines to perform text mining processes. Our application presents them a simple facade that thats in input from them, runs the input through an analysis pipeline (consisting of annotators, cas consumers, etc) and returns an analysed, annotated document to them. But we also want our application to be easily extensible and changed, in case we have a better version of analysis engine, we want to deploy just the engine to the client without having to re-compile and re-deploy the whole application. Can we make use of PEAR to do the deployment? If so, what about the types used in the analysis engines in the PEAR, how does the deployed application know about the new or modified types in the PEAR?
