title: Can I use Tika for content extraction on Google App Engine?
body: <p>I'm working on a web service that requires content extraction from uploaded documents (PDF, PowerPoint, Word, etc), and I'd like to host this on Google App Engine to keep costs low. Short of running a Google Compute VM to run Solr/Tika as a server, what are my options? Can I use App Engine's Java hosting to wrap around Tika and return content?</p>
  
  <p>The app flow looks like this:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>User uploads document. Worker task is placed into queue.</li>
  <li>Worker task is consumed, triggering sending the filename to Solr for Tika extraction. This process could hypothetically be a Java app reading the file's contents and sending them to Tika.</li>
  <li>Contents are stored in fulltext search engine and in database.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Using the task queue to execute the Tika command line app does not seem possible.</p>