UIMA-AS best practices?

[Jens Grivolla <j+...@grivolla.net>]

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

Re: UIMA-AS best practices?

[Chris Roeder <ch...@ucdenver.edu>]

On 12/1/10 7:43 AM, Jens Grivolla wrote:
> 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?

I can't say our practices are best, but I've seen some success starting
and monitoring a number of UIMA processes with Sun (now Oracle) Grid Engine 
(SGE). Most of our UIMA code wraps NLP work from others intended to run
stand-alone, so detecting and collecting errors and is a mixed-bag that
we're still working on.

In the past, I've used scripts that check a process's status and restart if it's 
died. I've also seen code installed as a daemon on linux when possible
or appropriate.  Here's a page that discusses various options:
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2545993/restoring-restarting-a-java-daemon-from-crash



-Chris


>
> 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
>


-- 
Christophe (Chris) Roeder
Software Developer, Professional Research Assistant
Center for Computational Pharmacology, University of Colorado Denver
12801 E 17th Ave, MS 8303,  Aurora, CO 80045 USA
chris.roeder@ucdenver.edu / tel: (303) 724-7574