Is DreamFactory the right tool for text analytics?

REST API
1

Is DreamFactory the right tool for text analytics? We’ll be writing a number of scripts to enhance text analytics. Let’s take two: 1) ingest RSS feeds and 2) an ontology annotator. The first simply grabs the latest RSS postings in a feed and returns it. With the the second, you send text,and you get back the same text annotated with certain words that match an ontology.

Our dashboard uses Meteor and AngularJS. With it, and applying the KISS principle, it makes the most sense to create our scripts as a REST API and call it from AngularJS. So we write a quick REST API in PHP or PERL hosted in Apache. We’re done. Why DreamFactory then? Ok, DPS offers service credentials, a bit of security, and a convenient way to manage the REST API users. Other than these advantages, how can DreamFactory help with our requirements?

It seems that our dashboard would call the DreamFactory REST API which in turn calls our remote web services which would be the RSS and annotator REST API we created. Is that correct? Why not call our REST API directly and bypass DreamFactory? Can we write the RSS and annotator web services directly in DreamFactory in PHP, Python, or Perl? Otherwise what advantage does using DreamFactory have for our modest requirements? Do we even need DreamFactory or is it overkill? If it proves useful to our project, what is the best path forward for developing our RSS and annotator apps in DreamFactory?

Thanks,

Cristy

2

Sounds like you might not need DreamFactory, if you’re fine writing the security and user management yourself. The only server-side scripting available is JavaScript on the V8js engine. Additional PHP, Python, or Perl would have to be integrated yourself, or added some other way.