Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Tuesday April 05, 2005

April LA Java Users Group and standing "on line"

Thanks to Jon Cruz for coming in and talking about internationalization in Java at tonight's LA JUG. It was a very interesting topic to me. Mostly because as a US dweller (I've never been fortunate enough to travel out of the country-- even Mexico which is only 2 hours away), I suffer from not seeing the everyday need for internationalization the way most of the world runs into it. Probably mostly because of our nationalized and pervasive media, we don't have too many regionalisms.

SidebarThe one I normally think of first is "on line". If you're on the east coast of the US, you stand "on line". To those of us on the west coast, online refers to being on the network. To us, you stand "in line". There are others, like in St. Louis there is a deragatory term "hoosier", where elsewhere that's actually a good thing.

Surprising things for me out of this preso:

• Resource bundles can include java classes
• Internationalizing your code may save your bacon in a number of other ways than getting your code portable
• Windows codepages can be challenging to deal with (okay, so that wasn't so surprising)
• Layout for Swing is pretty straightforward when internationalizing, but many J2EE apps probably have some other issues
• Internationalization and accessability will play well together, giving the developer a wide array of solutions without having to spend valuable coding time on it... if they use Java's technologies correctly

One quick resource to mention, I18n G.A.L.has some interesting pointers and some interesting info. Even a link to the latest IETF April Fools joke. My favorite was always "sheep over sonet".

Also, I've been accused of not updating the blog often enough. Sorry! I've been in the middle of laptop reconfiguration so I can demo interoperability of the Sun Java System Messaging and Calendar Servers with Outlook 2003 on Windows (by way of the Sun Java System Outlook Connector). All of this overhead has meant I've spent less time being cerebral and blogging my equally cerebral (at least, as cerebral as I get) thoughts. I'm out of the dark spot of the woods now. :)