Re: Support for internationalization

Marc Palmer <[email protected]> Wed, 11 May 2005 18:44:27 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.java.webmacro.user
Organization	AnyWare Ltd.
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Ankur G35 Saxena wrote:
> Hi I have not been getting myself upto date on the latest version of
> webmacro, last I downloaded the api was in march of 2004. Now I have a
> task at hand where in I have to support languages like chinese, french
> and many more...
> 
> How do i go about doing this? Anything special I have to do, some
> examples would be great. Also when I put text into the webmacro file
> from java, can I put any char(unicode for other languages) since I
> will picking these translated words from an XML file.

The usual approach in JSP-land seems to be creating a ResourceBundle 
instance per session (assuming the language can be set by the client) 
and accessing that in the page for all UI strings...

i.e. for "hello world":

<html>
<body>
<b>$UIResourceBundle.HELLOWORLD</b>
</body>
</html>

...I'm rust on ResourceBundle so it might not support get(Object). 
Anyway the upshot of this is that you just need your servlet (or WM 
template I suppose) to get the language from the HTTP headers if 
possible, and then load the correct strings into a Map or similar, and 
put that in the session.

Then in every page, in a common included header you can do:

#set $UIStrings = $Session.XXXXX

Where XXXX is where you get the stored Map from the session.

You could of course do this by creating Maps in a common WM template 
(using #bean) containing all your translations so you don't have to mess 
with other files / ResourceBundle loading schemes (never been a fan of 
that mechanism).

Then you could put those into maps by ISO language code... preferably 
trying to avoid it being done for every request (#macro / include as macro?)

$stringsByCountryCode.put( "en", $stringsEN);
$stringsByCountryCode.put( "fr", $stringsFR);
$stringsByCountryCode.put( "de", $stringsDE);

...and then in every page processing you get the strings you need by:

#set $UIStrings = $stringsByCountryCode.get($Session.XXXXX)

...and remember to check for null...

Cheers
-- 
Marc Palmer    [email protected]
			
Wangjammers - Java, J2ME and Web Consultants
   ~ http://www.wangjammers.org/



-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by Oracle Space Sweepstakes
Want to be the first software developer in space?
Enter now for the Oracle Space Sweepstakes!
http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7393&alloc_id=16281&op=click