RE: i18n - Java vs Perl

Another option is to wrap IBM's C++ ICU library with Perl.  We used SWIG to
produce a very nice Perl API on top of the ICU.  This would give you support
for everything that the JDK has (including resource bundles) with the added
bonus of open source.  For, example, you have full access to the code set
mapping files (unlike the JDK).

It took me less than a week to use SWIG to wrap a large subset of ICU.  Most
of that time was spent learning SWIG and ICU.

www.swig.org

http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/


									Jim Hargrave
									Senior Software Engineer
									Linguistic Technologies
									Global Sight



-----Original Message-----
From: www-international-request@w3.org
[mailto:www-international-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Olin Lagon
Sent: Saturday, February 19, 2000 4:21 PM
To: George Spafford; chrismbrown@home.com; www-international@w3.org
Subject: RE: i18n - Java vs Perl


I echo George's view on using Java. Java's resource bundles are extremely
flexible and easy to use. Right now you have to use a text file (Java
property file) but you can EASILY extend resource bundle functionality. We
wrote some code to use XML or a relational database for storing your
localized content and will be releasing it to the general public soon. In
other words, with Java you can extract all of your content cleanly, store it
as text, XML, or in a database, and wrap workflow around the externalized
content to easily track changes, translate incremental changes, and add new
languages easily. Also, Java has tons of utilities for formatting dates,
times, and currencies as well as built in support for character set
conversions.

We ported a Web app to pure Java (http://www.123Translate.com/) and it
supports 18 languages, 35 currencies, and all of the world's timezones. All
content is stored externally as Resource Bundles (our extended version) and
tied into translation workflow. Java provide nearly all of the
internationalization framework except for three main issues: (1) we wrapped
their character set conversion features into more convenient methods; (2)
Java doesn't provide rounding tables for currencies so you could end up with
$123.09876 if you didn't know how many decimals to round to; and (3) Java
doesn't provide "character set" guessers. Beyond the Java framework, we ran
into tons of other issues which we are going to present as a case study at
the upcoming LISA conference in D.C. -
http://www.lisa.org/2000dc_agenda.html. Be happy to share our slides with
anyone interested.

Here's a great link to get you started with internationalization with Java:
http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/index.html.

Aloha, Olin

--
Olin Lagon, Chief Architect      Voice: 808.780.3978 (direct)
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-international-request@w3.org
> [mailto:www-international-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of George Spafford
> Sent: Saturday, February 19, 2000 12:33 PM
> To: chrismbrown@home.com; www-international@w3.org
> Subject: Re: i18n - Java vs Perl
>
>
> The latest versions of Perl do support message catalogs, but you are far
> better off with Java in my opinion.  #1.  Native use of Unicode
> for strings
> and #2 you can use resource files.  I guess the biggest reason I'd
> recommend Java is that you can thread your application so you don't have
> the overhead of launching multiple instances of the PERL interpreter
> (unless you are running one of the new Perl interpreters which don't
> require an instance per executing script of the interpreter).  This can
> give Java a huge performance advantage over Perl  in terms of memory
> utilization and response time.
>
> Hope this helps some.  I'm sure others can give you a lot more info as my
> knowledge is peripheral. For more info on Java and I18N, there
> was a great
> presentation at Unicode 15.  Go to
> http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc15/papers.html for a great paper
> (Conference
> TA4) by Richard Gillam of IBM.
>
> George
>
>
> At 08:31 PM 2/18/00 -0700, Chris Brown wrote:
> >I'm in the process of considering internationalization for a
> large website
> >that includes much Perl and server-side Java. We're considering rewriting
> >much of the Perl in Java if the feasibility of internationalization with
> >Java is much greater than with Perl. I'm sure that this
> comparison has been
> >considered by many but I can't seem to find any good resources
> on the net.
> >Can anyone point me in the right direction?
>

Received on Tuesday, 22 February 2000 13:13:02 UTC