ORO Software Archive
ORO, Inc. was a software development company that focused on
providing high quality object-oriented class libraries and
toolkits for software developers in the very early days of Java.
During ORO's lifetime, thousands of Java developers adopted its
Java libraries for use in both commercial and in-house projects,
and some of the largest computer companies in the world licensed
the software. As a result, there still exists a good deal of
software that depends on old ORO class libraries. This ORO
software archive is provided purely to help you get software to
work that depends on the libraries. The software is completely
unsupported, but the original licensing terms still apply.
NetComponents Status. NetComponents is currently available under the Apache License as Apache Commons Net. Support questions should be directed to the Apache Commons user and dev mailing lists. Folks such as Rory Winston, Steve Cohen, and Jeffrey Brekke—who were also users of the software—took up the lead in developing the software. Since their stewardship ended, the quality of the software has taken a nosedive as ill-conceived patches were (and continue to be) applied willy-nilly without community discussion, causing regressions and new bugs, and creating an increasingly fragile and incomprehensible code base. As a result, I gave up on trying to assist further development of the software.
OROMatcher and the rest. In June, 2000, OROMatcher 2.0, PerlTools 2.0, and the rest of the ORO text processing software (AwkTools and TextTools) were donated to the Apache Jakarta Project, which took over custodianship of the software, housing CVS repository, mailing lists, and release archives. The software is now Jakarta ORO and is licensed under the Apache License, which is a BSD-style license that allows projects such as Jython to continue to use the software without special licensing. The Apache Jakarta project has been retired, so there are no longer any mailing lists for obtaining support.
ORO Software Upgrades
NetComponents users may upgrade to Apache Commons Net, although I can no longer recommend they do so. Instead, they should look for an alternative library that provides similar features with a more modern implementation (e.g., using NIO) and better designed code, assuming such a library exists. OROMatcher, PerlTools, TextTools, and AwkTools users may upgrade to Apache Jakarta ORO, but should migrate to the java.util.regex package. Support questions for Apache Commons Net should be directed to the Apache Commons user and dev mailing lists. Support questions for Apache Jakarta ORO may not be directed anywhere, although you may still obtain the source code from the Apache repository.