L10n and I18n in the Real World

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L10n and I18n in the Real World

• Dan Moore
• Moore Consulting
• June 9, 2005

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My experience

• Contractor who worked on 3 year old ecommercish
  site.
• Added to existing working application
• Java on Tomcat with Oracle backend
• 36 countries,15 languages, two frameworks.
• Vast majority of work outlined here was done by
  Zia Consulting
• They get the blame!
• Reflects state of system as of February

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Your experience

• How many folks have worked on i18n applications
• J2SE
• J2EE
• J2ME?
• What locales (any programming lang)
• European
• Asian
• Other

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Outline

• General process
• Definitions
• Display
• Locale Identification
• Data flow
• Issues
• Resources
• Ask questions anytime

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Definitions

• Locale
• ISO standard language_country_variant
• fr_CA, en_US_jive
• Internationalization
• Localization
• Character set
• UTF-8 or ascii
• Bundle (resource)

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Bundle Examples

• Greeting.properties
• HELLO_KEYHello there.
• GOODBYE_KEYBye
• Greeting_fr.properties
• HELLO_KEYBonjour.
• GOODBYE_KEYAu revoir
• Greeting_kr.properties
• HELLO_KEY\uc0ac\uc774\ud2b8\ub9f5
• GOODBYE_KEY\uc0bc\ucd74\ud2b2\ub345
• One bundle, multiple files

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Display

• Web
• PDF/Email
• Localized features
• Other localization possibilities

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Web

• Some class matches keys and locales to generate
  text
• Jetspeed (velocity)
• l10n.HELLO_KEY
• Path like configuration
• Expresso (taglib)
• ltbeanmessage key"HELLO_KEY" schema"com.zia..."
  /gt
• Schema pointed to one bundle.
• Also provided java method to do so.
• Struts similar to expresso

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PDF/Email

• iText
• Specify encoding, possibly specify TT font
• com.lowagie.text.pdf.BaseFont
• createFont() method
• Character set in content-type header
• text/plaincharsetutf-8
• text/html charsetutf-8

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Localized features

• Different sections of site were localized in
  different languages
• Product A supported for en and de, but product B
  only for en
• In db, tie features (Product A) to locales
• Always have a fallback locale of en
• Allow users to change locale easily
• Locale specific fields on forms
• In db, tied fields (last name) on forms to
  locales.

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Other localization possibilities

• Currency
• DecimalFormat class
• Dates
• Not localizedone common format
• Name of company
• Sorting
• Not localized that I saw
• Could have been done on client side

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Locale identification

• How do you handle statelessness
• Custom solution vs headers
• Headers browser
• Cookies, url rewriting or hidden form fields
• Localization feature required folks to switch
• Other business reasons (pass locale via params)
• Consider headers
• Look at user set
• Everyone knows some english, technical crowd.
• Locale Choice page
• Image Please choose your country...
• Drop down box (in English)

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Data Flow

• Message bundles
• Infrequently changing
• Database loads
• Frequently changing
• Why not all in database?

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Message bundles continued

• Dynamic generation of strings
• Sample value Email Dan now!
• EMAIL_KEY1Email and EMAIL_KEY2now!
• EMAIL_KEYEmail 0 now!
• Struts allows in taglib JS and Exp don't
• Access/excel
• Character limits (1024)
• Images and common properties
• Separate property file
• Native2ascii
• Ant task

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Native2ascii example
ltnative2ascii encoding"UTF-8"
src"indir" dest"outdir" ext"properties"gt
ltinclude name".txt"/gt
ltexclude name"readme.txt"/gt ltexclude
name"CVS/"/gt lt/native2asciigt
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Data process continued

• Oracle
• NLS_LANGamerican_america.AL32UTF8
• Sqlldr
• CHARACTERSET UTF-8
• Case study on sqlldr i18n on OTN
• PL/SQL
• Setup your database browser
• Tried ODBC
• 3 rows/sec

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Issues

• Translation time
• QA of output
• External testing resources
• Scheduling restart times
• It's 5 o'clock somewhere.
• Locale fk everywhere that data is displayed
• Custom locale code (not en_US, rather eng_US)

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Resources

• ziaconsulting.com
• blogs.msdn.com/michkap/default.aspx
• java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/i18n/
• mooreds.com/weblog/archives/000199.html
• joelonsoftware.com/Unicode.html
• ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/flavell/www/lang-neg.html
• mooreds.com/i18n/
• databasejournal.com/features/oracle/article.php/34
  93691
• ant.apache.org/manual/OptionalTasks/native2ascii.h
  tml

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Thanks

• Reviewers
• Ben Galde
• Susan Mowery
• Corey Snipes
• Karen Josey
• Ziaconsulting
• Mike Mahon
• Y'all