Annotators are designed to be re-usable, re-deployable components. By this, we mean, that a future user of the component might want to "scale it out" as a service running in separate JVMs, etc. The UIMA framework's component "isolation" is designed to enable this kind of separation of concerns.
Having said that, there is a way to gain access to sharable, arbitrary Java things in an annotator - by using "resources". These are essentially any Java class you write; they are instantiated by the framework and can be made available to multiple annotators, but only within the same running JVM (so using it may reduce your component's reusability in future scenarios). One note: although the resources APIs are written with a common use-case - that of having initialization "load" an external resource - you don't need to do that if it isn't part of the use-case you're addressing. -Marshall On 7/20/2010 9:08 AM, Alex wrote: > 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). > > > >
