Thilo Goetz wrote:
Steven Bethard wrote:
Steven Bethard wrote:
On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 6:29 AM, Thilo Goetz <[email protected]> wrote:
I don't know the details of what you did, but it sounds to me like
you threw many advantages of UIMA (reusability, transparent remotability
etc.) right out of the window.
I don't see why that would be the case. We're still creating
AnalysisEngineDescriptions, just in Java code, not XML.
[snip]
I haven't played around with "transparent remotability", but I can't
see why using Java descriptors instead of XML descriptors would make
that any harder. Maybe you can elaborate?
I would like to hear an answer to this if anyone knows. Is there
something you can do with an XML descriptor that you can't do with an
AnalysisEngineDescription object?
You can't do any of the things that our documentation
says you can do with a descriptor. You can't read it,
for example.
The IT/Java industry has grappled with issues concerning building systems
by plugging modules into a central integration platform for quite a
while now.
UIMA AE's are analgous to either servlets or EJBs (beans) and the CPM
would be
called a "container" as Tomcat and WebSphere are. The configuration in
these cases started out in XML as in UIMA. Newer releases have some of
the meta data is migrating to Java Annotations. The benefit of Java
annotations
is that the meta-data stored in XML can be written in the java source
in a way
that you don't get the problems associated with having two places that
define
the name of a parameter for example. The AE descriptor information would be
in the annotations where the CPE gui could read it when creating the CPE
xml descriptor.
While their may be some Resume-Driven-Design that prefers the complexity
of these meta-data-driven approaches to the simplicity of doing it all
in Java,
I think the motivation comes from the desire for a clear code separation
between
container and "bean". It's clear to me in the extreme case of a
commercial vendor supplied
container where you don't have access to the source so you can't code your
pipeline construction in java. While they could provide an
initialization callback,
that's in effect what they are doing, yet with more restriction.
This is discussed in more detail under either "Inversion of Control" or
"Dependency Injection."
http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html
-Chris
Steve
