Wintertree Thesaurus Engine Java SDK

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Revision History

Contents:

The product name has changed to Wintertree Thesaurus Engine (it was formerly known as ThesDB Thesaurus Engine). The Wintertree Thesaurus Engine class library is contained in a file named wthes.jar.
CompressedThesaurus and TextThesaurus can now be loaded from streams as well as files. The contents of a TextThesaurus can also be saved to a stream. This makes it possible to use Wintertree Thesaurus Engine in applets and other contexts where file access is not permitted or not possible.
Support for pseudo-hierarchal thesauri has been added. Through naming conventions for categories and special synonyms, a thesaurus can be given a hierarchal structure. A category can contain "synonyms" which are really references to child categories, much like a directory in a file system can contain child directories.
A "small" thesaurus database which contains more tightly focussed synonyms, which may be better suited for expanding terms in searches than the large, general purpose database, is now included.
A hierarchal product thesaurus database is now included, containing synonyms for generic product names (not brand names).
Separate thesaurus databases with American, British, and Canadian spellings are now included.
Text thesaurus files are now saved using single-byte ISO-8859-1 characters where possible, and in Unicode where necessary.
A license key is now required to use Wintertree Thesaurus Engine. See the Wintertree Thesaurus Engine Java SDK Programmer's Guide for more information.

The limit on the number of keywords in compressed thesaurus files was increased from 32K to 64K.
Improvements were made to the accuracy of scores produced by the TypographicalComparator class.
Categories for past-tense verbs and plural nouns have been added to the American and British thesaurus files.
An example showing how to use ThesDB from a Swing (JFC) application was added.
Classes ThesaurusDialog, EditThesaurusDialog, and HelpViewer are no longer part of the ThesDB class library. Instead, the source code for AWT and Swing implementations of a thesaurus dialog are now included with the AWTDemo and SwingDemo examples. Consult the source code for information on using these classes.

Version 4.1 is the first release of the ThesDB Java SDK. The major release number is "4" for consistency with Wintertree Software's other ThesDB Thesaurus Engine SDKs.