Drinky is a standalone Java GUI application (using Swing) that allows a user to search a collection of mixed drinks. The data consists of a set of drink names with the ingredients, instructions and other related information for each drink. Drinky is available for free (the link is at the bottom of this page), and offers a number of options for searching:

• Wildcard searches (using '*' and '%')
• Soundex (words that sound similar)
• Regular expression
• Contains

The first two search modes reuse the code featured elsewhere on this web site. A wildcard search means the '*' and '%' characters have a special meaning: '*' means to match any string of consecutive characters (zero or more), and '%' means to match any one character. A Soundex search means to match on words that sound similar. A regular expression search means to allow the use of regular expressions in the search term. If you don't know what a regular expression is, don't use this option.

One useful feature of this application is the ability to search based on not just a word in the drink name, but also include a word or phrase from the drink's ingredient.

Here is a sample screenshot:

There is currently no help file, but there is tooltip text for most of the controls, so the interface should be easy to understand. One possible source of confusion may be the two "Go" buttons on the Search page. The first one, under "Find drinks by name", will cause the software to search for a match based on just the term entered by the user in the drink name. This is the most common means of searching. The second "Go" button, under "Find drinks by ingredient", will cause the software to search for a match based on both the term entered in the first text field and the ingredient entered in the second text field. When searching by ingredient, the text entered in the second text field (ingredient) is checked as a simple substring of the ingredients stored in the data file.

The application is available here (465KB). To run, just download the file and either double-click the file (from an Explorer window) or enter the command "java -jar drinky.jar" (from a command prompt). The data file is embedded in the jar file.

Part of the code is copyright JGoodies Karsten Lentzsch. This is limited to portions of the GUI.

The source code and build script can be downloaded here. It is released under the MIT license (other than the JGoodies code). This file does not include the drinks data file that's in the jar file. To rebuild drinky.jar, extract the drinky.ser from the drinky-src.zip linked above and put it in the main directory.