Development Setup

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Eclipse IDE
• Repository
• Project parameters
• Finishing touches
• Further reading

Introduction

In this section, we will detail how to set up the working development environment you will need in order to participate in the development of HeidelTime.

As HeidelTime is written entirely in Java, and Eclipse is the most popular Java IDE, we will focus on setting you up with this particular IDE. If you choose to use a different IDE, you should be able to implement our instructions relatively easy in an analogous fashion in that IDE.

By the end of this tutorial, you should have a working copy of HeidelTime in your IDE and should be able to start implementing changes or features to HeidelTime.

Eclipse IDE

You can grab a copy of Eclipse at http://eclipse.org/downloads/. You do not need to get a specific version or abandon your current installation of Eclipse; if you don't have one already, the classic version should be adequate. Under Linux, you can just get Eclipse from your package manager.

Repository

As HeidelTime is under steady development, any changes you make should -- if possible -- be made against our latest revisions in the version control system. This makes it way easier to integrate your changes into our current codebase if you choose to share your work with us.

We use Git, a distributed version control system. You should grab a copy of it and install it on your operating system; any of MacOSX, Windows or Linux have installation candidates.

If you have not checked out HeidelTime's code from the repository before, you should get a fresh copy by cloning the official repository. From a command line, do

$ git clone [email protected]:HeidelTime/heideltime.git

This will create a folder called heideltime in your current directory and download all of the files residing in the repository as well as a history of previous changes done by us.

Project parameters

At this point, we will import the source code into an Eclipse project. To do that in a proper fashion, follow these steps:

1. In Eclipse, go to File -> New -> Project..., create a Java Project.
2. Give the project a name (i.e., heideltime), untick Use default location and enter or browse to the location of the heideltime folder we created during the cloning process. Hit Next. * In the Source tab, make sure that the src/ folder is marked as a source folder and that the Default output folder is named "class", not "bin". * In the Libraries tab, make sure that uima-core.jar from the lib/ folder is added as a library.
3. Right click on the project, go to Configure and then select Convert to Maven Project.

At this point, you should have a project filled with source code and are almost ready to get going.

Note that as of HeidelTime 1.3, you will need copies of the StanfordPOSTaggerWrapper .jar file and the JVnTextProWrapper bin to be linked as Libraries inside your Eclipse project for all error messages to disappear. Eclipse will still be able to compile everything but those two wrappers without them, though.

Finishing touches

Once you have changed something, before you try it out in the context of a UIMA pipeline, you will want to do a clean build at least once by going to Project -> Clean....

And that is all you need in terms of basic setup.

Further reading

Once you are all set up, you can take a look at ArchitecturalOverview to better understand HeidelTime's source code.

To test your changes' impact on the results that HeidelTime produces, take a look at ReproduceEvaluationResults to set up an obstacle course to run HeidelTime through. Alternatively, take a look at readme.txt in the doc/ folder, which contains more detailed instructions on how to set up a test.