Poker hand evaluation

[appel]

Hello,

I'm programming a texas hold'em game in my free time, using Java.

I've been playing for a week or so on PokerStars.com, and really like the game. (I'm new to it) I've studied everything I believe I need to know, but one thing eludes me.


My main problems I need to solve are the following:

1. Since the player has 7 cards, I need to figure out what combination of 5 cards out of 7 cards makes up the best possible hand.

2. When I've figured out 1. , then I want to compare the hands of each player (who hasn't folded), to figure out the winner.

Also:
3. Tell the player what kind of a hand he has, some don't know the rules and I want to print somewhere on the screen "You have a pair of aces", or "You have a flush, king high.". So I need to create a textual description of the hand, very similar as in the PokerStars.com program!


At first I thought this wasn't going to be a big deal, but after Googling for one night I discovered that this is actually a big topic.

I've found some applications, like
pokersource, but it's non usable for me for many reasons. There are also tons of calculators to calculate the odds, but I'm not interested in that.

Any ideas?