Introduction

Installation

Acknowledgements

OROMatcher ^TM is a set of regular expression pattern matching and utility classes for Java descended from a package originally written by Daniel F. Savarese , a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland College Park. While OROMatcher ^TM retains vestiges of the original package in terms of design (namely the MatchResult and PatternMatcher interfaces), it is an entirely new package in terms of implementation and functionality. While there are several other regular expression packages for Java, both free and commercial, most of them suffer from flaws in performance, functionality, and correctness of implementation. To the best of our determination, OROMatcher ^TM exceeds all other Java regular expression packages in all those areas. Original Reusable Objects, Inc. (ORO, Inc.) is committed to providing the highest levels of quality in all of its products.

We are especially attuned to the desires of the users of our software, who have already greatly contributed to OROMatcher's feature set through their insightful comments and suggestions. We believe the users of our software are best able to determine what functionality needs to be added, removed, or redesigned. Therefore we actively solicit comments, suggestions, and bug reports from our users. You can email suggestions to suggestions@oroinc.com and bug reports to bugs@oroinc.com . If applicable, please include the product name in the subject of your email.

Today OROMatcher ^TM is used by hundreds of programmers on a daily basis to add the power of regular expressions to their Java applications and applets. OROMatcher ^TM will continue to be freely distributed by ORO, Inc. for the benefit of the Java programming community. Because we do not charge for use of OROMatcher ^TM, we cannot guarantee technical support, but we will give priority, as with all our products, to fixing reported bugs.

Currenly we want the package to be usable with the 1.0.2 and 1.1.* JDK's. But we will release a 1.1 enhanced version of the package leveraging the 1.1 features, such as serializability, that our users want. At that point we will distribute both 1.0.2 and 1.1 versions of the classes.

Installation

For simplicity we have decided to not to wrap up the OROMatcher ^TM class files in a zip or JAR file. Therefore, to make use of OROMatcher ^TM, all you have to do is place the directory structure rooted at com/ into a directory of your own choosing. Then simply add that directory to your CLASSPATH environment variable.

Acknowledgements

There are many people who we would like to thank for their suggestions and early support during beta-testing. Unfortunately, we can't list them all. But we'd like to take a stab at thanking a few. We'd like to thank Michael Forte of Sun Microsytems for his early support for an earlier incarnation of the package, Martin Fong of SRI for enthusiastic beta-testing, Louis-David Mitterand of Zoom.Com for some extremely helpful debugging, Jeffrey Friedl author of Mastering Regular Expressions from O'Reilly & Associates for testing a version of the package with his infamous test suite, Alex Tang from Netscape for stressing a late beta in commercial work, and Brian Zak of Actra Business Systems for his invaluable beta-testing. We also want to thank the many programmers who have used OROMatcher ^TM in earlier incarnations and beta versions.

Copyright © 1997 ORO, Inc. All rights reserved. Original Reusable Objects, ORO, the ORO logo, and "Component software for the Internet" are trademarks or registered trademarks of ORO, Inc. in the United States and other countries.
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