[UIMA-1969] Add support for external resources hosted on an http server

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.3.1SDK
• Fix Version/s: 2.4.0SDK
• Component/s: Core Java Framework
• Assignee: Marshall Schor
• Reporter: Jörn Kottmann
• Created: 17/Dec/10 15:34
• Updated: 13/Oct/11 20:30
• Resolved: 13/Oct/11 20:30

Description

Currently external resources for an Analysis Engine can only be loaded from the file system. This is useful
for many use cases in which the resources are almost static and rarely change. In our scenario the resources
are updated frequently and hosted on a central server. The server could expose a file system over the network
via NFS or windows file sharing, but it seems to be more intuitiv and easier to just distribute the resources via http.

In order to do that the resource loading must be extended to also support resource which are available via
http. It seems that the current code for the file URLs can be easily extended to also allow http resources.
According to the documentation it uses URL.openStream and forbids http URLs which would be supported
by that method.