bedeviled mojo slop

I consider the "gold standard" for internationalization and localization components to be IBM's International Components for Unicode (ICU). This API is ahead in some respects to the standard Java APIs for internationalization and localization. IBM's ICU components have bindings for C/C++ and Java.

I tried to come up with a list of APIs that might form a core set of components for internationalization and localization in Ruby. If there are specific instances of APIs that should be referenced here, please let me know.

• Locale: Ruby-Locale, How to Output Dates in Another Language (references Ruby-Locale)
• Resource Bundles: Ruby GetText API, Using GetText to Translate Your Rails Application (references GetText), Ri18n (Ri18n is an internationalization and localization library for Ruby applications.)
• Calendar: See below for Date. What about different calendar systems such as the Buddhist calendar or the Hebrew calendar? Check out the Ruby-Calendar API.
• Date: Date and DateTime
• TimeZone: Ruby on Rails TimeZone class. But, does this have support for daylight savings time? The TZInfo - Ruby Timezone Library page says no.
• Text processing APIs ala the java.text package: Formatting time. What about something like BreakIterator (finding the location of boundaries in text)? or Collator (locale-sensitive String comparison)? or NumberFormat (for formatting and parsing numbers)?

It looks like components in Ruby supporting internationalization and localization are there, but they are scattered across a number of packages instead of integrated into a cohesive set of APIs in the core language. There also wasn't an international components API for Ruby similar to IBM's International Components for Unicode.

Technorati Tags: ruby internationalization localization

via World Views, JDK 6.0 Internationalization Features

A new article about features under development for JDK 6.0 has a section on internationalization features. The big theme is opening up the architecture of the internationalization frameworks – enabling different implementations of resource bundles as well as the provision of locale data for locales that Sun doesn’t know enough about. The long awaited normalization API and a Japanese calendar round out the feature set.

I do like the thought of a provider-based approach for loading resource bundles although I have not yet run into a situation where I needed to have a different bundle lookup process or have to worry about caching of resources. The ability to manipulate the caching of resources would be useful, especially on the server-side. At the very least, for example, it would enable updating of resources for already deployed web applications.

Of course it'll work

static String normalize(String src, Normalizer.Mode mode) 

Normalizer.Mode.NFKC 

Internationalization is the process of writing software in such a way as to make the localization of the software to a particular region as easy as possible. In other words, internationalization aims to remove the burden of re-engineering an application when writing for multiple countries and/or regions. Localization deals with the translation of textual elements to a particular locale. There are also a number of user interface elements that may be added or removed from a locale to provide the user with a native look and feel to the application. This session will cover many of the aspects of internationalization such as locales, isolating locale-specific data, formatting of data, Unicode, input and output, GUI development, input methods, etc. The session is intended to provide an overview and introduction to the many different aspects of Java internationalization and how these fulfill the promise of "Write Once, Run Anywhere (in the world)".

Provides robust and full-featured Unicode services on a wide variety of platforms. ICU supports the most current version of the Unicode standard, and provides support for supplementary characters (needed for GB 18030 repertoire support).

The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar and thus has a number of interesting properties that distinguish it from the Gregorian. Months start on the day of (an arithmetic approximation of) each new moon. Since the solar year (approximately 365.24 days) is not an even multiple of the lunar month (approximately 29.53 days) an extra "leap month" is inserted in 7 out of every 19 years. To make matters even more interesting, the start of a year can be delayed by up to three days in order to prevent certain holidays from falling on the Sabbath and to prevent certain illegal year lengths. Finally, the lengths of certain months can vary depending on the number of days in the year.

"In other cases, the acronym might be different when it is translated for a given locale. For example, the English acronym NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) is known as OTAN (l'Organisation du Traité de l'Atlantique Nord) in French and NAVO (Noord Atlantische Verdrags Organisatie) in Dutch."

Also be aware of abbreviations. i18n, the abbreviation for internationalization is i19g (Internationalisierung) in German!

This article describes how supplementary characters are supported in the Java platform. Supplementary characters are characters in the Unicode standard whose code points are above U+FFFF, and which therefore cannot be described as single 16-bit entities such as the char data type in the Java programming language. Such characters are generally rare, but some are used, for example, as part of Chinese and Japanese personal names, and so support for them is commonly required for government applications in East Asian countries.

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