In the summer of 1996, Java, a new language by Sun Microsystems was announced. It was predicted to be the language of the Internet, powering "Applets" and "Servlets". Cliff, being a technology geek wanted to learn this new language and was looking for a project to build his knowledge of Java. He decided to write a spell checker. It turns out that a spell checker is a rather complicated thing to do well. However, in 1996, Cliff released his first Java software program, JSpell.

JSpell turned out to be somewhat of a hit. It was originally sold for $195.00/copy and was flying off the "shelf". Actually it was sold as an electronic download so there were no boxes or shipping charges involved. The only other Java spell checker at the time cost around $20,000.

JSpell was submitted to the JARS, Java Applet Rating Service and placed in the top 5% of all Java applets. JSpell started out originally as simply a spell checker for the Java language, allowing other Java developers to add spell checking support to their Java programs.

In the early 2000's, JSpell was updated to allow spell checking of HTML forms (note, web browsers did not have built-in spell checkers at this time). JSpell was written using the JavaScript 1.0 specification and worked in many browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, etc.

Now that spell checking is built-in to most web browsers there is not a lot of demand from users to purchase JSpell, however, JSpell remains a top ranked Google search result when searching for "spell checker". The JSpell website receives 100's of thousands of hits a month from users around the world that want to spell check something quickly and easily.

Click the above image to give JSpell a try!