- From: tom garland <tom.garland@Sun.COM>
- Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2002 15:34:45 +0100
- To: www-i18n-workshop@w3.org
Apologies for this late posting. We in at Sun's Globalization Engineering centre in Ireland have embarked on a project which we feel is relevent to this forum.
What is this project?
The Locale Data Repository (LDR).
Goal:
A single data store and set of services to allow applications to access and and use locale data via a web service or platforn service.
Why are we doing it?
We have different platforms and projects many of which have their own locale data formats and different mechanisms for accessing same. This results in unneccessary duplication of work. We need to consolidate these formats and mechanisms
into a set of commonly agreed upon services which understand the needs of applications with regard to locale data. Standardizing these services would enable applications on different platforms to communicate, share, and understand locale data thus ensuring that not only to clients get verified locale data but they get it in the format they expect.
In order to reduce risk and increase flexibility this project will consist of a set of loosely coupled clients and services. At the core of the project is a data store which will store all the locale data objects generated from tools which read in the platform data. All communication to and from the data store will be done by RPC calls (for example SOAP or XML-RPC). This ensures one data store implementation can be replaced with another as well as full network availability. Essentially the data
store to platform files represents milestone 1 of the project. We have just started participating in the li18nux-lade team (leader Helena S Chapman) which hopes to collect and verify the locale data with which we hope to populate the data store. The diagram below illustrates the initial architecture.
--------- -------------- ------------- ------------
| | | | | | | |
| Data | <-RPC-> | Data Store | <-RPC-> | Platform | -File-> | Platform |
| Store | | Interface | | Interface | | |
| | | | | | | |
--------- -------------- ------------- ------------
After this has been completed the next milestone will expose the data store as a full Service which will allow service based applications to use the locale data and functions in the Locale Data Repository. This service based scheme will communicate using an XML based locale format which we hope can be developed in association with the W3C. Hence this email. The application we will design at this point will be a web based interface to the repository, used for editing locales. We would be
willing to make this available as a sample implementation or test bed for this new locale format. The following diagram illustrates the architecture.
--------- -------------- ------------- ------------
| | | | | | | |
| Data | <-RPC-> | Data Store | <-RPC-> | Platform | -File-> | Platform |
| Store | | Interface | | Interface | | |
| | | | | | | |
--------- -------------- ------------- ------------
/\
||
RPC
||
\/
-------------- ---------------
| | | |
| Service | | Application |
| Interface | <-XML-> | |
| | | |
-------------- ---------------
The next milestone will involve moving entirely to the service based architecture and solidifying the XML locale format.
--------- -------------- ------------- ------------
| | | | | | | |
| Data | <-RPC-> | Service | <-XML-> | Platform | -File-> | Platform |
| Store | | Interface | | Interface | | |
| | | | | | | |
--------- -------------- ------------- ------------
/\
||
XML
||
\/
---------------
| |
| Application |
| |
| |
---------------
We have just embarked on this project so we're not sure how far others have taken this concept. Regarding Misha's recent email:
1. Why is topic X important?
2. Why should the W3C work on topic X?
3. How can you and your organization help with the work on topic X?
Hopefully 1. and 2. have been addressed above. As for 3. As stated above we are more than willing to participate in this forum and indeed come up with our own proposals to drive it. We are also willing use what we develope internally as a test bed for whatever comes out of these discussions.
rgds
tom
----
Tom Garland
Engineering Manager
Globalization Engineering (Ireland)
Tel: +353 1 8199110
Email: tom.garland@sun.com
Received on Monday, 15 April 2002 10:34:48 UTC