UIMA AS extended test suite has become quite large. Each JUnit test requires one or more xml deployment descriptor to run. A lot of these static xml descriptors are the same except for a few config parameters that change error handling, scaleout, queue name, etc. There are about 200 xml files already and this list keeps growing. This is becoming annoying having to create static xml file for every test. Instead I propose creating a Factory object to enable each JUnit test to dynamically create and configure deployment descriptors it needs. I would use Apache XMLBeans to create xml backing java beans and factories which will be generated from UIMA AS deployment descriptor xml schema. I would provide a java wrapper around generated XML beans to simplify creation of primitive and aggregate deployment descriptors. Once this is in place, I would also like to get rid of about 200 of static UIMA AE xml descriptors used to instantiate and configure UIMA components. For this I would definitely use UimaFIT which provides factories and API to dynamically create and configure AE descriptors.
Let me know if you have any comments. JC
