Tommaso Teofili wrote:
Hi all,
my initial need was to simply use UIMA as OSGI bundle so I looked at the
uimaj-as-osgi-runtime and uimaj-eclipse-runtime that seem to me very near to
what I deserve, they were fine except that (at the moment) I don't need the
UIMA-AS packages and the 'eclipse' label puzzled me a bit and actually, as
far as I can understand, the Eclipe plugin configurations in the
uimaj-eclipse-plugins POM are not needed for an OSGI environment.
So my first idea was only to do some crafting on uimaj-eclipse-runtime.
When I created uimaj-as-osgi-runtime we named it osgi and not eclipse,
because we noticed that it will now be used also outside of eclipse.
We should rename uimaj-ep-runtime to uimaj-osgi-runtime.
uimaj-ep-runtime does not depend on any eclipse plugins and
can be used with an OSGi server. Actually I did that already together
with Eclipse-RegisterBuddy to be able to load annotators from a bundle.
What I realized after Thilo's reply was that instead of having a unique UIMA
OSGI runtime artifact (bundle) with all the stuff inside we could make each
UIMA module (uimaj-core, uimaj-tools, uimaj-cpe, etc) a single bundle with
all its fine grain packages and resources.
Taking this approach does not has a real advantage over the
approach we have right now, in my opinion. Maybe you save a
few KB storage on the server, if you do not deploy all the classes.
But what else do you think we get ?
If this should be the case we should provide alternative packagings
(jar/pear/bundle) to maintain compatibility with non-OSGI systems.
More over (for annotators) if we enable the bundle packaging then we need to
modify the tools that use pears i.e. the CVD to be able to load AEs also
from a bundle
So annotator bundles are already supported.
To make uima OSGi compliant we should do the annotator loading a bit
different.
Can we not use the OSGi's FrameworkUtil to load annotator class ?
If so we can have a bundle activator for uima-ep-runtime
which modifies the way annotators are loaded.
Jörn
