ICU4J API proposal: add getLocale method to locale based services

Expiration: 11/18/2003
Please refer to the previous message regarding getLocale, titled:
"API addition proposal: getLocale APIs for locale driven services"

Java requires several changes:
- In ICU4J 3.0, we are going to add the ULocale class, which will allow us to 
support keywords in locales. I propose to make this addition early. This class 
will currently have a Locale object and the only method implemented will be 
Locale toLocale(); which will return the Locale object. The motivation is that 
we will work completely through the ULocale object and if we add the getLocale 
methods now, we will come in a situation where we would have overloads that 
differ only in the return type, which is not good. This class also defines the 
constants required for getLocale API.

package com.ibm.icu.util;
public class ULocale {
	public static final class ULocaleDataType{
		/**
		 * Actual locale where data is coming from
		 * @draft ICU 2.8
		 */
		public static final ULocaleDataType ACTUAL_LOCALE =
                                     new ULocaleDataType(0);

		/**
		 * Valid locale for an object
		 * @draft ICU 2.8
		 */
		public static final ULocaleDataType VALID_LOCALE =
                                     new ULocaleDataType(1);

		private int localeType;
		private ULocaleDataType(int id){
			localeType = id;
		}
		private boolean equals(int id){
			return localeType == id;
		}
	}
	
	private	Locale locale;
	public Locale toLocale() {
		return locale;
	}
	public ULocale(Locale loc) {
		locale = loc;
	}
}

- since we cannot add methods to the base Format class, it will be inherited by 
UFormat class - this will be the parent for all the ICU4J formatting classes.
package com.ibm.icu.text;
public abstract class UFormat extends Format {
	
	public abstract ULocale getLocale(ULocale.ULocaleDataType type);

}

- all the classes that were inheriting from Format will implement getLocale

- we will also add the following:
com.ibm.icu.text.BreakIterator:
public abstract ULocale getLocale(ULocale.ULocaleDataType type);
com.ibm.icu.util.Calendar:
public abstract ULocale getLocale(ULocale.ULocaleDataType type);
com.ibm.icu.util.Collator:
public abstract ULocale getLocale(ULocale.ULocaleDataType type);

Thank you!

Regards,
v.

-- 
Vladimir Weinstein, IBM GCoC-Unicode/ICU  San Jose, CA [email protected]