Well, I got the website back up in under a week. I had to build from scratch since I wasn’t able to salvage anything from the AWS instance. Of course the data and code are all sitting on my laptop, so it might have been just configuration and reloading. However, time marches on, and since I was installing from scratch, I took the opportunity to update OS (Ubuntu 16.04), Java (1.8), Apache (2.4), Tomcat (minor update) and to upgrade from Sesame 2.8 to rdf4j, its replacement. One thing that didn’t get upgraded was CORS-filter. Although it was available, I discovered that Tomcat had equivalent functionality available, just waiting to be configured. CORS-filter has served me well and it seems to still be maintained.
Once I had everything configured, it seems that queries are somewhat faster, which I assume is thanks to rdf4j and possibly upgrading java.
A few days later, I took advantage of some posts I had found while figuring out how to reconnect apache and tomcat to set things up for https, so now all transactions to arachb.org and arachnolingua should be redirected to an https connection. Switching over to https wasn’t much more difficult that configuring Apache in the first place. I went with a commercial certificate provider since I had paid for a certificate I never activated a few years ago. Hopefully the renewal will be easy.
On the inside, Apache and Tomcat are speaking over the JServ protocol (ajp13) which may help with performance as well.
Work on the curation tool is continuing, and I think I have found the sweet spot mix of methods, url redirects, and jinja2 templates to get the claim editor to finally lay down. The story is all about switching between individual and class expression participants, but I’ll save it for another time, as I do need to finish the post I’m righting on my other blog on the role of machine learning in the study of behavior.
An Arachnolingua Blog 