David Lee Todd, Unknown Product Manager



	David Lee Todd, Unknown Product Manager People who love sausages and software should never watch either being made

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Friday January 13, 2006

Need to handle Asian encodings?

A few weeks ago I was made product manager for internationalization activities at Sun SeeBeyond, in addition to my regular eView Studio duties. I guess they think I don't have enough to do....;-) Anyway, this is a fascinating area. For our products, it goes way beyond the normal Sun requirements of translating GUIs and online help screens into various languages. Since we are in the middleware game, what it means to us is the ability to handle messaging in weird double byte encodings like shift-JIS and Big5, as well as UTF-8, UTF-16 and other crazy stuff. Japanese EBCDIC, anyone? Pretty cool stuff, and actually only weird or crazy from my own narrow, ethnocentric view.

Sun is such a big company that sometimes we don't know all the great capabilities we have in-house. So if your customers have the need to communicate between applications using Asian encodings, we may be able to help.

Posted by davidleetodd ( Jan 13 2006, 10:20:40 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Comments:

Yes indeed, though what I <em>really</em> find weird these days, is people who still run 7-bit ASCII on their desktops :-) I've been UTF-8 for longer than I care to remember - though as I used to work in g11n, perhaps I'm biased. I have written iconv encoding tables for IBM's cp850 (one of the myriad of EBCIDC encodings out there) to 8859-1, though, so I know what you mean... It's a pretty complex subject

Posted by Tim Foster on January 13, 2006 at 10:58 AM PST #