JesterJ CLI?

[janhoy]

This framework seems capable, but I was surprised to find you need to compile Java to use it? Have you thought of making a CLI and a config file format to let users get started right away, and only power use cases would need to compile Java?

E.g.

cat << EOF | bin/jesterj --
jesterj:
  inputs:
    - type: fs
      folder: C:\foo
      depth: 3
  output:
    solr:
      url: http://localhost:8983/solr/myCollection

[fsparv]

CLI was proposed in #7 though not with the use case you propose here. The thoughts for assisting folks who are afraid of java are several:

1. Java's not THAT scary, someday I'm going to make a video showing how nearly anyone could copy/paste/modify their way through the java by starting with the shakespeare example
2. In theory any JVM language could be used, the only interesting bit would be ensuring that the class can be annotated and thus found via scanning the jar supplied. It might also thus be possible to support Jython, Groovy, JRuby, Kotlin, Scala, or even clojure.... though
3. If I go so far as to depend on an interpreter for one or more of those languages (or provide a good way of plugging them in) then I can potentially accept the text version without forcing the user to compile

At the moment however a fully declarative config is not desirable because one sometimes wants to do things like probe for the number of processors on the machine and adjust the number of instances of the rate limiting step. (I have one very processor bound client, that actually does some of the work they need with C code that I helped them integrate into solr (and thus also the PreAnalyze processor). It's nice that I can test it locally and effectively utilize my 32 thread desktop, and then drop the same code onto a 96 vcpu machine and it just soaks up the extra capacity and starts using it.

Having a DSL or declarative config becomes potentially more attractive after #173 is implemented, because that will cover the above case much more smoothly, but such things add maintenance weight and so far this has been a 1.1 man band operation, so I've kept it simple.

[janhoy]

Yea, a script language DSL would be neat, I imagine some Python DSL jesterj-config.py would almost feel like a config file for many, while it in reality is code being executed.

[nsoft]

Contribitions, stories of attempts that failed. etc. welcome, of course (Also want to point out for readers that alt lang configuration is mentioned in the docs too... https://github.com/nsoft/jesterj/wiki/Plan-Providers#plans-in-other-jvm-based-languages

Give it a shot, let me know how it goes. ;)