UIMA Equivalent to Stand alone?

[melvinma]

I am new to Heideltime and UIMA. In theory, I could go directly to use HeidelTime standalone. However, since I might want to use UIMA in the future, I spent some time digging around UIMA and HeidelTime codes. (If this is not a right forum to discuss this question, please let me know which one is better... thanks!)

The question is simple, when designing HeidelTime standalone, why not just configure an instance of analysis engine of UIMA? It appears that we could simply do that... Am I missing something? I am thinking about doing that in my code.

EDIT: one more question, if I just want to setup Heideltime as one of my web services, what is the simplest way to do that? run standalone like code for each request?

Thanks!