#######
SUMMARY
#######
uimaFIT is a library that provides factories, injection, and testing utilities for UIMA.  The
following list highlights some of the features uimaFIT provides:

 * Factories: simplify instantiating UIMA components programmatically without descriptor files.  
   For example, to instantiate an AnalysisEngine a call like this could be made: 
   AnalysisEngineFactory.createPrimitive(MyAEImpl.class, myTypeSystem, paramName, paramValue)

 * Injection: handles the binding of configuration parameter values to the corresponding member
   variables in the analysis engines and handles the binding of external resources.  For example,
   to bind a configuration parameter just annotate a member variable with @ConfigurationParameter.
   Then add one line of code to your initialize method:
   
     ConfigurationParameterInitializer.initialize(this, uimaContext).  
     
   This is handled  automatically if you extend the uimaFIT JCasAnnotator_ImplBase class.

 * Testing: uimaFIT simplifies testing in a number of ways described in the documentation. By making
   it easy to instantiate your components without descriptor files a large amount of 
   difficult-to-maintain and unnecessary XML can be eliminated from your test code. This makes tests
   easier to write and maintain. Also, running components as a pipeline can be accomplished with a
   method call like this: 
   
     SimplePipeline.runPipeline(reader, ae1, ..., aeN, consumer1, ... consumerN)

uimaFIT requires Java 1.5 or higher and UIMA 2.4.0 or higher.

############
AVAILABILITY
############
uimaFIT is licensed with Apache Software License 2.0 and is available from the Apache UIMA project:

http://uimafit.googlecode.com
http://code.google.com/p/uimafit/wiki/Documentation
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/uima/sandbox/uimafit

uimaFIT is available via Maven Central. If you use Maven for your build environment, then you can
add uimaFIT as a dependency to your pom.xml file with the following:

<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.uima.fit</groupId>
<artifactId>uimafit-core</artifactId>
<version>2.0.0</version>
</dependency>

#########
Reference
#########

If you use uimaFIT to support academic research, then please cite the following paper as appropriate:

@InProceedings{ogren-bethard:2009:SETQA-NLP,
  author    = {Ogren, Philip  and  Bethard, Steven},
  title     = {Building Test Suites for {UIMA} Components},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Software Engineering, Testing, and Quality Assurance for Natural Language Processing (SETQA-NLP 2009)},
  month     = {June},
  year      = {2009},
  address   = {Boulder, Colorado},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {1--4},
  url       = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W09/W09-1501}
}

#######
HISTORY
#######
Since end of 2012, uimaFIT is part of the Apache UIMA project. 

Before, uimaFIT is was collaborative effort between the Center for Computational Pharmacology at the
University of Colorado Denver, the Center for Computational Language and Education Research at the
University of Colorado at Boulder, and the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab at the
Technische Universität Darmstadt. uimaFIT is extensively used by projects being developed by these
groups.

The initial uimaFIT development team was:

Philip Ogren, University of Colorado, USA
Richard Eckart de Castilho, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Steven Bethard, Stanford University, USA

with contributions from Niklas Jakob, Fabio Mancinelli, Chris Roeder, Philipp Wetzler, Shuo Yang, 
Torsten Zesch.

#######
SUPPORT
#######
Please address questions to user@uima.apache.org.  

#####
Misc.
#####
uimaFIT was formerly known as UUTUC.