Running Oracle Outsidein Technology (OIT) in Docker

Oracle Outsidein Technology provides a set of tools and SDKs to convert many forms of data to readable documents. It also holds data extraction and reduction capabilities. Used by multiple firms and tech fronts for more than 3 decades, OIT is a vast product here to stay for a long time.

Here, I made a starting attempt on using OIT's Image export using docker. Created a small docker file with the oracle-java8 base image, loaded the image export jars and dependencies, created a few mounting volumes and ran it on a single sample pdf file. An enriching and learning experience for me and my father all the same. This blog shows the steps I took to get image export working on my machine.

Prerequisites

• Docker (to be installed on your machine, you can go to docker's website and download it for your OS windows/linux/mac)
• OIT Image Export SDK (Get it here)

The image export SDK also contains some samplefiles to play with. Make sure to do all the tasks below in the same folder or in folders inside the same folder.

Steps

1. Create a Dockerfile
   

   # Get the oracle java image
       FROM store/oracle/serverjre:1.8.0_241-b07
       LABEL Author="Divyaksh (@divyaksh-shukla)"
       
       # Installing additional tools
       RUN yum install -y unzip
       
       WORKDIR /home/oit
       COPY ix-8-5-4-linux-x86-64.zip .
       RUN unzip ix-8-5-4-linux-x86-64.zip -d ix_image
       WORKDIR /home/oit/ix_image
       RUN sh makedemo.sh
       WORKDIR /home/oit/ix_image/sdk/demo
       
       ENV CLASSPATH=oilink.jar:oitsample.jar 
   

2. Create Docker Volume mounts for inputs/samplefiles, outputs and fonts (may not be needed in some cases)

   $ docker volume create oit_output
   oit_output
   $ docker volume create oit_samplefiles
   oit_samplefiles
   $ docker volume create oit_fonts
   oit_fonts
                       

   See if the docker volume is created by listing

   $ docker volume ls
   DRIVER              VOLUME NAME
   local               oit_fonts
   local               oit_output
   local               oit_samplefiles
   

   Inspect the docker volume for addtional information

   $ docker volume inspect oit_output 
   [
       {
           "CreatedAt": "2020-05-07T14:53:00+05:30",
           "Driver": "local",
           "Labels": {},
           "Mountpoint": "/var/lib/docker/volumes/oit_output/_data",
           "Name": "oit_output",
           "Options": {},
           "Scope": "local"
       }
   ]
   

3. Copy the contents of sdk/samplefiles in the downloaded "image export" to the right location, on the hist system, by inspecting the docker volume
4. For this example we need the liberation font, found in /usr/share/fonts/liberation on Linux
5. Build the Image

   docker build --rm -t oit-sample:1 -f Dockerfile .
                   

6. Run the Image on a container

   docker run -it --rm -v oit_output:/home/oit/outputs -v oit_samplefiles:/home/oit/samplefiles -v oit_fonts:/home/oit/fonts oit-sample:1 java -cp oilink.jar:oitsample.jar OITSample /home/oit/samplefiles/adobe-acrobat.pdf /home/oit/outputs/test.tif tiff /home/oit/fonts
                   

7. Also available as a shell command

   bash run-it.sh
   

We can now finally see some output as follows

$ bash run-it.sh 
Sending build context to Docker daemon  125.5MB
Step 1/11 : FROM store/oracle/serverjre:1.8.0_241-b07
 ---> ef9c1a0152ab
Step 2/11 : LABEL Author="Divyaksh (@divyaksh-shukla)"
 ---> Using cache
 ---> 375998c9ca19
Step 3/11 : RUN yum install -y unzip
 ---> Using cache
 ---> 3116220fc555
Step 4/11 : WORKDIR /home/oit
 ---> Using cache
 ---> e9a5f7f9978b
Step 5/11 : COPY ix-8-5-4-linux-x86-64.zip .
 ---> Using cache
 ---> 6f07b04abbae
Step 6/11 : RUN unzip ix-8-5-4-linux-x86-64.zip -d ix_image
 ---> Using cache
 ---> 85d6e5a3ce1e
Step 7/11 : WORKDIR /home/oit/ix_image
 ---> Using cache
 ---> 20256453949d
Step 8/11 : RUN ls
 ---> Running in 5c9d8519c1de
makedemo.sh
README
redist
sdk
Removing intermediate container 5c9d8519c1de
 ---> 6b8673720c9b
Step 9/11 : RUN sh makedemo.sh
 ---> Running in 47f7e4b17e60
Removing intermediate container 47f7e4b17e60
 ---> 0fa1b311067f
Step 10/11 : WORKDIR /home/oit/ix_image/sdk/demo
 ---> Running in cd60511e8e72
Removing intermediate container cd60511e8e72
 ---> 53a3eb155b79
Step 11/11 : ENV CLASSPATH=oilink.jar:oitsample.jar
 ---> Running in 0d95affdf08d
Removing intermediate container 0d95affdf08d
 ---> bdad82cab940
Successfully built bdad82cab940
Successfully tagged oit-sample:1
File Identifier : Adobe Acrobat (PDF)(1557)
File Identifier (Raw): Adobe Acrobat (PDF)(1557)
Creating file: /home/oit/outputs/test.tif
Creating file: /home/oit/outputs/test0001.tiff
Creating file: /home/oit/outputs/test0002.tiff
Export Successful

The Dockerfile and bash script run-it.sh are available on my github