Re: [Distributed services] What is i18n on web services based web applications

 This is exactly what I am working on myself. You might want to check the locale discussion in the Yahoo Groups:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/locales/
This is also where we discussed the content of Suzanne's position paper on locales. In the meantime we have advanced and are closely looking at xml, as well.
Dave
  Kentaroh Noji <KNOJI@jp.ibm.com> wrote: 
Hello, 

The following is my thought about i18n distributed services(Web Services). 

- List of work items

We should define the goal of i18n architecture(or model) for web services based web applications, and its requirements. The following fig. 1 illustrates my understanding about Web services except UDDI. As XMLP/SOAP is a kind of RPC, service requesters are able to call remote services one after another. The calling mechanism is sessionless and stateless basically. What is internationalization on that environment? 

So far, I am thinking of the following work items. 

1. Define the requirement for internationalization of web services based web applications(e.g data integrity among services?, locale depend data transparency? ...)   
2. Define the goal of internationalization architecture(or model) of web services based web applications. 
3. Assess whether existing web related i18n(e.g. Charmod, Unicode based i18n such as normalization, collation and charclass, xml i18n, contents negotiation, XML media type, etc) is enough for the i18n architecture and requirement. 
4. If the above work item finds that existing web i18n lacks some functions for web services, identify and propose them(e.g. locale model for web? locale categories? SOAP interface for i18n?..., etc) 

Fig 1. 
                                              
  REQUESTER         PROVIDER A        PROVIDER B     
  CLIENT         +-----------+     +-----------+     
   TYPE A         |   WSDL    |     |    WSDL   | 
+-----------+     +-----------+     +-----------+ 
| XMLP/SOAP |<-+->| XMLP/SOAP |<-?->| XMLP/SOAP |
+-----------+  |  +-----------}     +-----------+     
|    XML    |  |  |    XML    |     |    XML    |           
+-----------+  |  +-----------+     +-----------+   
|    HTTP   |  |  |    HTTP   |     |    HTTP   | 
+-----------+  |  +-----------+     +-----------+ 
               | 
               +-Locale? Unicode? 
                 Normalize? Charset?-------+ 
    CLIENT                                 | 
    TYPE B           SERVER D              |
+-----+------+    +------------+           |                       
|XHTML|XFORMS|<-+-| Transcoder |           |
+-----+------+  | +------------+           | 
|    XML     |  | | XMLP/SOAP  |<----------+         
+------------+  | +------------+ 
|   HTTP     |  +>|   HTTP     |
+------------+    +------------+ 

Thanks,
Kentaro Noji
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 
IBM, Globalization Center of Competency. 
Yamato Software Lab 



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