Since Mahout 0.5, Mahout's recommender webservice example taste-web is not included as part of standard distribution.

Looking around on the web, there are several folks who are looking to see Mahout 0.6 and above versions have a working example of the webservice.

Given it took me a few hours to bring together the relevant files from integration directory, and put them all into an independent maven based build, I thought it might be useful for others. Also note that, this directly pulls the mahout dependencies like mahout-core, mahout-math, mahout-examples from maven repository. Right now its pulling 0.6 version, but you can easily modify the pom.xml to pull the later versions.


Steps to run the webservice:-
1. Download the source from my git repository.
2. go to mahout_service directory
3. Do "mvn install", this step will use the pom.xml to compile the recommender files and the core jar files needed by example recommender into a .war file
4. The key files of interest are in following directories:
    - mahout_service/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml - It contains the entrypoint to the Recommender Webservice.
    - mahout_service/src/main/java/com/mykidscart/mahout_service/RecommenderServlet.java - This file has the servlet entrypoint which returns recommendations.
5. At the end of step 3, a .war file is created under mahout_service/target/mahout_service.war.

6. Simply drop the the .war file into standard tomcat installation's webapps directory. For example, for my installation I put it under:
apache-tomcat-7.0.28/webapps/
7. After copying to webapps, expand the war file in the webapps directory by doing: "unzip -d mahout_service ./mahout_service.war"
8. Restart your tomcat server, and go to the following url:
http://localhost:8080/mahout_service/RecommenderServlet?userID=111&howMany=400

9. If everything goes well, you should see the recommendations on the browser.

Note: The standard webservice installation uses the org.apache.mahout.cf.taste.example.grouplens.GroupLensRecommender for giving recommendations. If you want to change the recommender, and provide ur own recommender, please modify the web.xml to replace the grouplens recommender with your own recommender class.

Also the resources directory "mahout_service/src/main/resources" has ratings.dat and movies.dat file for reading the input data. you can change that to read your own specific data relevant for your own recommender.


Any questions, send me an email at: [email protected]