gate.creole.CustomDuplication Maven / Gradle / Ivy

Go to download

Show more of this group Show more artifacts with this name
Show all versions of gate-core Show documentation

GATE - general achitecture for text engineering - is open source software capable of solving almost any text processing problem. This artifact enables you to embed the core GATE Embedded with its essential dependencies. You will able to use the GATE Embedded API and load and store GATE XML documents. This artifact is the perfect dependency for CREOLE plugins or for applications that need to customize the GATE dependencies due to confict with their own dependencies or for lower footprint.

The newest version!

/*
 *  Copyright (c) 1995-2012, The University of Sheffield. See the file
 *  COPYRIGHT.txt in the software or at http://gate.ac.uk/gate/COPYRIGHT.txt
 *
 *  This file is part of GATE (see http://gate.ac.uk/), and is free
 *  software, licenced under the GNU Library General Public License,
 *  Version 2, June 1991 (in the distribution as file licence.html,
 *  and also available at http://gate.ac.uk/gate/licence.html).
 *
 *  Ian Roberts 23/03/2010
 *
 *  $Id: CustomDuplication.java 15333 2012-02-07 13:18:33Z ian_roberts $
 */
package gate.creole;

import gate.Resource;
import gate.Factory;
import gate.Factory.DuplicationContext;

/**
 * Interface which should be implemented by any Resource type which cannot be
 * duplicated in the standard way (see {@link Factory#duplicate(Resource)
 * Factory.duplicate}). If a Resource class requires custom duplication logic it
 * should implement this interface and provide a method to create a new resource
 * instance that has the same behaviour as this.
 * 
 * @author ian
 */
public interface CustomDuplication {

  /**
   * 
   * Create a duplicate of this resource. The object returned
   * need not be of the same concrete class as this, but
   * should behave the same and implement the same set of GATE core
   * interfaces, i.e. if this implements
   * {@link gate.ProcessingResource} then the duplicate should also
   * implement {@link gate.ProcessingResource}, if this
   * implements {@link gate.LanguageAnalyser} then the duplicate should
   * also implement {@link gate.LanguageAnalyser}, etc.
   * 
   * 
   * Typical uses for resource duplication are multi-threaded
   * applications that require a number of identical resources for
   * concurrent use in different threads. Therefore it is important that
   * duplicates created by this method should be safe for concurrent use
   * in multiple threads - in some cases it may be appropriate for the
   * duplicate to share some state with the original object, but this
   * must be handled in a thread-safe manner.
   * 
   * 
   * Implementors of this interface should not use covariant
   * return types, as to do so may limit the flexibility of subclasses
   * to implement duplication in the most efficient manner.
   * 
   * 
   * NOTE this method cannot be called directly, use
   * {@link Factory#duplicate(Resource)} instead.
   * 
   * 
   * @param ctx the current {@link DuplicationContext duplication context}.
   *          If an implementation of this method needs to duplicate any
   *          other resources as part of the custom duplication process
   *          it should pass this context back to the two-argument form of
   *          {@link Factory#duplicate(Resource, DuplicationContext) Factory.duplicate}
   *          rather than using the single-argument form.
   * @return an independent copy of this resource.
   * @throws ResourceInstantiationException
   */
  public Resource duplicate(DuplicationContext ctx)
          throws ResourceInstantiationException;
}