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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.

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/*
 *  Optional.java
 *
 *  Copyright (c) 2011, The University of Sheffield.
 *
 *  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, 29/Jun/2011
 *
 *  $Id: Sharable.java 14240 2011-08-12 09:46:14Z ian_roberts $
 */
package gate.creole.metadata;

import gate.Factory;

import java.lang.annotation.Documented;
import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy;
import java.lang.annotation.Target;


/**
 * Marker interface used to mark the setter methods of JavaBean
 * properties that are sharable.  When a resource is
 * duplicated using {@link Factory#duplicate(gate.Resource)}
 * the values of any sharable properties from the original
 * resource will be copied by reference into the duplicate.
 * In particular, and sharable properties that are themselves
 * resources will not be recursively duplicated, even
 * if the properties are also marked as {@link CreoleParameter}s.
 * 
 * The Sharable marker is typically used for cases where a
 * resource creates at initialization time a data structure which
 * it subsequently accesses in a read-only fashion. Duplicates
 * of this resource can share a reference to the original's copy
 * of this data structure rather than having to build their
 * own identical copy.
 * 
 * The default {@link Factory#duplicate(gate.Resource)}
 * implementation sets sharable properties at the same time as
 * init parameters (i.e. after the constructor call but before
 * init() is called).  So resources that make use of sharable
 * properties need to check in their init() methods whether
 * the sharable properties have been set, and only do the
 * necessary initialization logic if the property values are
 * null.
 */
@Documented
@Target( {ElementType.METHOD})
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface Sharable {
  /**
   * Defaults to true but can be set to false to explicitly mark a property as
   * not sharable when a superclass has marked it as sharable.
   */
  boolean value() default true;
}