Details
Minor Description
Currently the nutch web gui references a few parameters that are highly dynamic, e.g., searcher.dir. These dynamic properties are read from the configuration files, such as nutch-default.xml. One problem I'm noticing however is that in order to change the parameter in the built webapp (the WAR file), I am required to change the parameter first in the checked out Nutch source tree, rebuild the webapp, then redploy. Or, if I'm feeling really gutsty, I can go poke around in the unpackaged WAR file if the servlet container exposes it to me, and try and modify the nutch-default.xml file that way. However, I think that it would be really nice (and highly useful for that matter) to factor out some of the more dynamic parameters of the web application into a separate deliverable Context.xml file that would accompany the webapp. The Context.xml file would be deployed in the webapps directory, as oppossed to the WAR file itself, and the parameters could be updated there, and changed as many times as necessary, without rebuilding the WAR file.
Of course this will involve making minor modifications in the web GUI to where some of the dynamic parameters are read from (i.e., make it read them from the Context.xml file (using application.getParameter most likely). Right now the only one I can think of is searcher.dir, but I'm sure that there are others (in particular the searcher.dir one is the most annoying for me).
The timeframe on this patch will be within the next month.
Thanks,
Chris