WebLicht as a Service

Introduction

WebLicht as a Service (WaaS) is a REST service that executes WebLicht chains. This allows you to run WebLicht chains from your UNIX shell, scripts, or programs.

There are several advantages of using WaaS rather than making direct requests to WebLicht web services. WaaS uses the most up-to-date libraries and web service metadata, and requires no knowledge of individual web services, such as dependencies, parameters or URLs. Unlike the WebLicht web application, WaaS does not require a browser, which avoids problbs such as session timeout and file size limits.

Usage

To use Waas, simply send a document and annotation chain description to WaaS. WaaS will then execute that chain and return the annotated document to the application.

1. Creat a tool chain:
   1. Use the Weblicht interface to create a chain and download it.
   2. Download the chain using the "Download" buton. The downloaded file will contain all of the necessary metadata to run the chain.
2. Obtain an API key (good for three months):
   1. Switch to the "API Key" view using the menu at the top.
   2. Log in, then click "Generate" button. Save your API key.
3. Make an http post request with the multipart/form-data encoding (eg with curl):
   1. chains: downloaded from WebLicht in step 1.
   2. content: input to the chain.
   3. apikey: key obtained in step 2.
   4. URL: api/1.0/chain/process
   5. result: output of last service in the chain

curl -X POST -F chains=@chains.xml -F content=@inputFile -F apikey=apiKey URL > result