Many
times during our i18n/l10n testing we have observed quite a strange
behavior of GF Admin Console, particularly of its display language in
dependence on the language settings of the machine where GF is
running and of the browser used to access the Admin Console. We even
thought of a dependency on some other factors, such as the system
locale of the machine where Admin Console is accessed from, but these
have not been proved yet. Since we believe this bug has quite some impact for non English users, we hope to
attract some attention or raise a discussion around this problem :)
So, what
we have observed is:
- When
the (Linux) machine where GF is running is set to English like
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8,
everything may seem to be OK - the Admin Console GUI respects the
preferred language of the browser via which it is accessed (English,
German or French).
- When
the machine where GF is running is set to German and then the Admin
Console is accessed via a browser with its preferred language set to
English, the Admin Console is always displayed in German. When the
browser preferred language is changed to French and the page is
reloaded (or logout/login is performed), the Admin Console displays
in French (as it should). Setting the browser preferred language to
German causes the Admin Console to display in German (OK).
- The
behavior is analogous when the machine where GF is running is set to
French.
Summarized,
the display language behavior looks like this:
-
|
BROWSER
LANGUAGE
|
LANGUAGE
OF THE MACHINE WHERE GF IS RUNNING
|
|
EN
|
DE
|
FR
|
|
EN
|
EN
|
DE
|
FR
|
|
DE
|
DE
|
DE
|
DE
|
|
FR
|
FR
|
FR
|
FR
|
Moreover,
the Admin Console GUI also seems to somehow remember the previously
set language, which takes effect in the way of displaying some
messages and a few other things in the previous language. To see
this, try for example:
-
Set
the browser preferred language to French and access the GF Admin
Console. It should be displayed in French.
-
Log
out, set the browser preferred language to German, reload the login
page and log in. Now the Admin Console should be displayed in
German.
-
Press
the Logout button, a message should appear asking you whether you
really wish to log out – this message will be French now. Click OK
(Yes).
-
Do
not change anything, just log in again.
-
Press
the Logout button again, now the same message will appear in German.
-
You
can try switching back to French, logging in and out – you will
receive a German message this time.
-
And
so on ...
A very
similar behavior can be observed e.g. at the Login button tooltip,
some error messages, etc...
There is already some Java bug filed for this issue, but we could not find it. If you are facing those problem and it affects you, let us know (g11n@glassfish.dev.java.net) and we'll might be able to push more for it.
Note 1:
The GF domain needs to be restarted every time the system language of
the machine is changed for the change to take effect.
Note 2:
We have not included Spanish or other languages into the experiments,
but we expect that its behavior will be similar to German and French.
Note 3:
Tried with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and Firefox 3 on Solaris.
The trick is only to delete the $HOME/productregistry.xml file that is still here.
Then the dialog didn't show up.
