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AspellChecker

Originally developed in 2006 before web browsers came standard with spell checkers, this library served as an interface to the Aspell binary. Aspell is a spell checker available for Unix and Linux based operating systems as well as Windows. It is widely available and for a long time considered the de-facto standard in spell checking.

PHP includes an extension called Pspell, however at the time I developed this library I was using mostly shared hosting environments that did not include support for this extension. Still today the extension remains fairly painful to compile and only offers individual word checking support, not entire chunks of text. Ultimately, Pspell never struck me as a very viable solution to offering server-side spell checking support.

In 2006 the major browser contenders were Internet Explorer 6.0 and Mozilla's "Mozilla" (now SeaMonkey) and the adolescent Firefox. At the time, Internet Explorer 6.0 could have spell checking support added to it by way of ieSpell. Meanwhile Mozilla had an extension under development. The immature Firefox 1.5 didn't have much to offer and Firefox 2.0 was just emerging with it's support for extensions, thus gaining access to spell checking by that venue. The fact was, spell checking was not widely supported because the browsers did not ship with out-of-the-box solutions. You simply couldn't count on your users to have these plugins and extensions installed.

The scene has changed, spell checking is pretty standard - and there is less need for a server side solution. That said, I hope someone might find this library - a solution I used for several years - helpful. The code is release under a dual license of MIT and GNU, so have fun with it!

Click here to download the AspellChecker library.