Apertium scalable service

Introduction

Currently Apertium is a very useful translation platform, and hopefully it will be even more useful in the future, when new language pairs will be added.

But, if an application wants to take advantage of Apertium power, Apertium has to be installed on the same machine. Although installing Apertium is not a very difficult task, linguistic data are frequently updated, so the installation should be updated too. Moreover, communication between an external application and Apertium is not easy to code, because Apertium only reads input text from standard input.

There is another option: to use the web service located at http://www.apertium.org/, but it has two major problems:

• Its features are quite limited, since it can't list available language pairs, and only accepts http GET parameters.
• As it starts a new Apertium instance for each request, it consumes a lot of computer resources, making scalability difficult, especially when there is only a single server.

So, the aim of this task is to build an application wrapper for Apertium with a public web service API (REST) that allows programmers to access it in their desktop or web applications, and perform the same operations that can be done with a local installation. The key feature of this application is scalability. It is intended to support high loads by scheduling and prioritizing pending translations according to the server-side resources available, i.e. load balancing. Environments can be static, where there is a fixed amount of servers available, or dynamic, as in cloud hosting services. When working in dynamic mode, new servers are automatically added if load rises. The availability of highly scalable web services for Apertium will catalyze the worldwide use and adoption of the platform in lots of translation contexts.