1. Installation and Quick Start

1.1 Prerequisites

Java

eHOST is a Java desktop application, so the only requirement is a Java runtime.

  • Java 8 or newer. eHOST is compiled for Java 8 and has been verified to run on both Java 8 and Java 17.
  • Get a runtime from Adoptium, Amazon Corretto or java.com, or use the JDK your organization provides.

  • Check what you have with:

    java -version

Operating system

Any desktop platform with a Java runtime and a graphical display works, including:

  • Windows 10 / 11 (and older Windows versions)
  • macOS
  • Linux

On a headless Linux machine you need a virtual framebuffer such as Xvfb, because eHOST is a Swing application and requires a display.

Getting eHOST

Download eHOST-<version>.zip from the releases page and unzip it anywhere you have write access. No installer is required.

If you prefer to build from source, the project is a Maven build that must be compiled with JDK 8:

git clone https://github.com/jianlins/ehost.git
cd ehost
bash script/mvn_install_jar.sh   # script\mvn_install_jar.bat on Windows
mvn clean package                # produces target/deploy/eHOST.jar

Disk and network

  • Projects (documents, annotations, reports) are plain files on disk; a project directory can live on a network share so that several annotators can work on the same corpus. eHOST places a .lock file in the project directory to make sure only one instance edits a project at a time.
  • eHOST works fully offline. Its built-in web server only listens on the loopback address (127.0.0.1) and is used for in-browser navigation and report serving — see the RESTful Server Guide.