My colleague, Jeff Rothenberg, and I, retirees, have developed an alternative to using regular expressions for searching for (and optionally replacing) patterns in text. We believe it is generally useful to Java programmers and would like to contribute it to Apache Commons, where we will continue to be active in maintaining the software. You can find the software and associated documentation at https://github.com/NormanShapiro/Naomi
Please let us know what further steps we should take to have our contribution considered. Thank you very much. Norman Shapiro