TinyMCE spellchecker java implementation

TinyMCE rich-editor have a plugin to provide Ajax-spell-checking functionality. See the link to TinyMCE plugin documentation
So, if you have a PHP and PSPell/ASpell on your server – then you are fine and you can use them, but this post is about the situation then you don’t have them or want to use your own implementation. In that case we can configure “spellcheck” plugin to use our own service.
What we have to do is to create a webservice compatible with the “TinyMCE spellchecker plugin” and configure spellcheck with the URL to that service. Because of browser security reasons this service should be hosted on the same domain as the application which use it (ajax calls can be blocked if requested URL is on another domain then your page). And since we are using java then we can use open-source Jazzy spellchecker library to implement spell-checking functions required by the TinyMCE spellchecker plugin

tinyMCE.init({
	theme : "advanced",
	mode : "textareas",
	plugins : "spellchecker",
	theme_advanced_buttons3_add : "spellchecker",
	spellchecker_languages : "+English=en-us,Swedish=sv",
        spellchecker_rpc_url    : "/spellchecker/jazzy-spell-check", //spellcheck url
});

In the configuration example above we set the link to our splechecker-service-url with the “spellchecker_rpc_url : “/spellchecker/jazzy-spell-check”;”
“/spellchecker/jazzy-spell-check” will be served by the servlet which use Jazzy project.
TinyMCE spellchecker plugin send JSON request to spellchecker_rpc_url with two possible methods:

1. checkWords – send the array of words as params attribute and expect the JSONArray of misspelled words in the result JSON-response attribute.
2. getSuggestions – send the checked word as the first and only element of params attribute and expects the JSONArray of suggested words the result JSON-response attribute.

So, when user click on “check spellcheck” button, plugin get the list of words and send them as the JSON request, with two parameters “method”=”checkWords” and “params”=”JSONArray(words)”. Servlet return the list of misspelled words in the JSON-response "{'id':null,'result': JSONArray(misspelled-words),'error':null}" , misspelled words are highlighted and once user click on one of them – request to get the list of suggested words is send to the server. “method”=”getSuggestions” and “params”=”JSONArray(checked-word)” . Server return the "{'id':null,'result': JSONArray(word-suggestions),'error':null}" JSON-response and list of suggestions is displayed to the user.

Update: You can see the backend java source code at the jspellchecker sourceforge project. SVN is accessible via “svn co https://jspellchecker.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/jspellchecker jspellchecker” or you can browse source-code . Please take a notice that source-code doesn’t include dictionaries. The dictionaries are located in the /WEB-INF/dictionary/${lang}-${country-code}.
Special thanks to the Rich Irwin who initially provide me the code.
The quality of spell-checking with jazzy depends on the quality of your dictionary. I think it possible to get thelist of words from Mozilla Dictionaries by saving XPI and opening it as ZIP file, saving dictionary file and remove “/xyz” from the end of the words, but please check the licensing notice before. You can also extract dictionaries form aspell (have no details how to do it)

Integration steps (thanks to Adam-Musial Bright)

1. Check out / download
   svn co https://jspellchecker.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/jspellchecker/trunk
2. cd trunk/tinymce-spellchecker
3. svn export web ~/temp/jspellchecker
4. svn export build/classes/org ~/temp/jspellchecker/WEB-INF/classes/org
5. Now deploy it on your webapp server
6. Now put something like this into your tinyMCE.init:
   spellchecker_languages : “+English=en,German=de”,
   spellchecker_rpc_url : “/jspellchecker/google-spellchecker”
   possible values are
   • “/jspellchecker/jmyspell-spellchecker”
   • “/jspellchecker/jazzy-spellchecker”
   • “/jspellchecker/google-spellchecker”
   • “/jspellchecker/lucene-spellchecker”

Update: To integrate TinyMCE-4 spellchecker with your server-side see https://achorniy.wordpress.com/2013/05/27/tinymce-4-spellcheker-integration/

About Andrey Chorniy

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Tagged with: howto, java, jazzy, json, service, spellchecker, tinymce, web
Posted in Software Development