A {@link com.wcohen.ss.api.StringDistance} is the basic class for computing distances. The score() function of this class outputs a distance measure between its two arguments. The other methods are there for efficiency, so that preprocessing steps (like tokenization) can be amortized over multiple comparisons with the same string.

The way that preprocessing steps are saved is by creating a {@link com.wcohen.ss.api.StringWrapper} object which contains the preprocessed string, plus whatever else needs to be cached. To do this, extend default implementation of StringWrapper.

Almost everything in this package implements StringDistance. The only (public) exceptions are StringWrapper; PrintfFormat, pilfered from Sun to make the explanations easier; {@link com.wcohen.ss.CharMatchScore}, which is a character-based distance metric; and {@link com.wcohen.ss.MemoMatrix}, a utility for defining edit-distance-based methods.