It is a Romanian monolingual dictionary: it contains Romanian words along with a Romanian explanation of what they mean and how they should be used. Based on the database from dexonline.ro, JaDEX offers access to an extensive repository of word definitions. It contains just under 300,000 dictionary entries from different sources (about 20): a team of volunteers has helped copy all the valuable information from the paper dictionary sources into a big online database, that can be searched online. At a certain point in the second half of 2006, that database was made available for downloading and using within stand-alone applications. With all that data available locally, I decided to give birth to JaDEX. Other applications are available to access DEX offline, but none works on Macs, so I embarked on this project. I chose Java to write the sofware, so that people could use it whether they were running Mac OS X or Linux or Windows. It runs on version 5.0 or above of the Java language and it allows you to

• Search the dictionary offline
• Browse a list of all entries by letter
• Save entry definitions to text files for future reference
• Update your offline copy of the dictionary from the original web site

The application is very easy to use and comes with a basic help system that gives information on all the characteristics of the software.

Motivation

I decided to write JaDEX because I am learning Romanian. It all started in June 2006, when I was offered a training job in Bucharest for two months, teaching Java and related technologies at Ministerul Finanţelor Publice. Although I was training in English, I thought it would be nice to try and learn some Romanian while I was there. My Romanian did not go very far, unfortunately, but I can now read and understand it with the help of a good dictionary. My need for a dictionary is why I happened to find DEX Online: I found it so useful that I wanted to be able to use it on my Mac as well...

This is how JaDEX was born! Now have a look at screenshots of it at work!

Acknowledgements

I will do this in chronological order, starting with personal indebtedness first.

First of all I am grateful to the people of IBM Italia and to Enza in particular for giving me the opportunity and trusting me to work on an international project. I would also like to thank Luca and Natasha of IO Tech for being so helpful and caring in the organization of my stay in Bucharest. Then comes a long list of names which I will omit for clarity, but they were all fundamental in making my Romanian experience so pleasant: it is the staff and all my students at the Ministry's IT centre where I worked: I hope they enjoyed learning with me as much as I enjoyed teaching them! And, last but definitely not least, the good friends I made in Bucureşti: Daniel (our local hero), Elisa and Maria (fellow emigrants from Italy). They really made my free time a lot of fun!

And now to the technical side of things... I want to make sure that this is clear: the dictionary is nothing to do with me, I only wrote software to access tonnes of data that the volunteers of the DEX online project have input. Our thanks go to them because their work accounts for 99% of JaDEX! Within this group of people I want to thank Francu personally for answering all my questions and kindly complying with all my requests. Another person that I would like to mention is my virtual friend Lucian: he emailed me to make suggestions and has kept in touch ever since. And by the way, we owe him the new name of the software (I initially called it JDbF, but his JaDEX sounded a lot better) and the Romanian translation of the user interface.

Before I finish, also thanks to all the people that have contacted me to ask questions, give advice or suggest features!