I was curious as to everyone's approach to accessing DAOs and other Java objects within a JCas Annotator (a Java object extending JCasAnnotator_ImplBase).
Since there is no way to pass objects as parameters through the process method (ie via an Object[]), the only thing I can think of doing is initializing DAOs through the initialize method by pulling Spring bean names from a resource file stored in the UimaContext and getting the objects through Spring's ApplicationContext. Also, how do we pass dynamic objects that are not of an existing CAS Type to an Annotator? Just for example, say I have a java.util.regex.Pattern object that is created before calling annotator.process(JCas) and I want to pass and use that object in the annotator without recreating it in the annotator (ie I don't want to attach the String value of the Pattern as a uima.cas.String to the JCas object and recompile it as a Pattern in the annotator).
