This chain of emails has a lot of tangled threads and this is an attempt to disentangle them and reevaluate what it we're trying to acheive.
I think there were basically two motivations for the whole ball of yarn: (1) We're unhappy with some of our APIs, in particular (a) the interface "CAS" can be an interface to either the whole CAS or to a view, and (b) the logic determining which "CAS" gets passed to an annotator's process method is confusing. We have a rare opportunity to clean some of this up in v2.1. (2) We want to come up with a clean, consistent design for the CAS that is consistent with the current OASIS UIMA Specification proposal. Primarily I'm the one who has been pushing (2), but I think I've been getting a little ahead of myself on that front. I'm getting myself into the position of trying to be the advocate of what's in the UIMA spec and convincing the other committers (well mostly Thilo, as he is the one giving this the most attention) that they make sense. But that does not seem like the right way to go about this. Taking a step back, the way this process ought to work is that the interested parties should work with the OASIS UIMA TC to produce an architecture spec that's agreeable, and then we'll figure out how to implement it. We can have discussions amongst the implementers here, but in the end we can't really decide any architecture issues on our own. It would not make sense for us to implement any major new designs unless we're sure they're going to be consistent with the forthcoming UIMA specification. So, in the coming months we need to make a significant effort to work with the OASIS UIMA TC on devising a CAS model that we can agree to. In the mean time, I think we should take off the table for 2.1 any significant realignment of the implementation with the spec. That being said, we still have this opportunty to do address some of our API issues (1) in v2.1, and I don't want to waste it. I think we should look at our most serious API issues and see if anything can be done about them. If there are things that we would otherwise want to do, and those things happen to be consistent with the current spec proposal, then great, we can do them now. But unless both of those conditions are met I think we may want to sit on our hands for now. Does that make sense? -Adam
