My most succesful private software project ever (the regex plugin for intellij with something like 30000 downloads) was abandoned since i did not use intellij any longer. Now starts the old intellij vs. eclipse battle. But points of the story is: I am quite fascinated by regular expressions for simple parse tasks (if you want to parse something complex i would use another technologie), but for simple pattern matching tasks (where the regular expressions are also quite simple) its perfect. No ugly indexOf, substring and off by one problems :)

With this mindset it could be useful if you had always a small regular expression evaluator with you to experiment and analyse your patterns.

There are some regular expression applications on the market, but none of them satisfied me.

So the regexer was born.

First take a look at the screenshots ...

For me the funny thing about the regexer is, that its implemented in a hybrid way:

• One half of the application is implemented in java (it simple takes the input, compiles a Pattern and tries to matches it againts another input). Then it outputs a little bit of html and puts it into a webview.
• The other half lifes in the html and is implemented in javascript by using the excellent jquery library.

I find this style of development really stimulating, because you have to know more than one technology, can use the best tool for the job and switch between different development paradigms:

• Layouting of a simple userinterface with the android-xml-layouts.
• Some kind of template approach to create the desired html out of the result of the pattern match.
• Styling with css and html to get a good looking result.
• Coding with javascript to get the needed dynamic into the html.

The sources are located in my private svn repository, which i access with git.