1 Formats - numbers Dates and Times Numbers are formatted - - PDF document

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4.10.2003 Software Engineering 2004 Jyrki Nummenmaa 1

GLOBALISATION

• I bet it is quite natural to dream about writing

software that is being sold around the world…

• However, there may be some small obstacles on

the way to selling your software worldwide.

• Today we study potential problems and solutions.
• Terms:

Localisation = adjusting software locally Globalisation, internationalisation = creating a software in such a way that it is eays to localise it to different countries.

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History

• As a little warm-up, consider the situation about

20 years ago.

• At that time there was an increasing interest into

creating software products, which could be sold to different customers within Finland.

• For customising the software, it was important to

put all user interface constants into a place, where they are easy to change.

• Program code is not such a place -> parameter

files or database are a much better choice.

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Simple example

• http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/i18n/inde

x.html deals with internationalisation issues.

• We have a quick look at their example.
• In the example, multilingual texts are managed

using

• a locale, identified by a (country, language) pair
• resource bundles, one per locale,
• property files, where strings are identified by

keys

• Strings are identified by keywords within a locale.

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What should be globalised?

• Messages
• Labels on GUI components
• Online help
• Sounds
• Colors
• Graphics
• Icons
• Dates
• Times
• Numbers
• Currencies
• Measurements
• Phone numbers
• Honorifics and personal

titles

• Postal addresses
• Page layouts
• Our example in the previous slide only dealt with a simple message!
• Labels can also be managed in a fairly straightforward manner,

if enough space is reserved for them.

• Now let’s have a look at the rest…

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Locales

• As we saw, globalisation in Java was based on the

use of Locales.

• A local is identified by a language (compulsory),

country (optional) and variant (optional).

• A class, whose behaviour is based on the use of a

locale, is called locale-sensitive.

• You can find locales available to a locale-sensitive

class by using the getAvailableLocales() method.

• There is also a default locale for a Java Virtual

Machine, and it can be accessed by Locale.getDefault()

• Different objects may use different locales.

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Identify what needs to be managed through locales

• As you think about locales, you will find out that

you have

• data items such as messages and sounds, which

change altogether with the locale, and

• data items, which remain the same, but whose

formatting changes, e.g. dates and numbers

• possibly data items not to be localised (internal

use, interface to another application, …).

• Design the globalisation - identify which is which.
• Arrange your data items into resource bundles

(e.g. items for the same form in the same bundle, so that you will not need to load unnecessary

• bjects).

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Formats - numbers

• Numbers are formatted differently in different

countries, e.g.: 345 987,246 – France 345.987,246 – Germany 345,987.246 - US

• Java includes a NumberFormat class that can be

used to format numbers, currencies (no exchange rates, though :) and percentages

• You can use the NumberFormat class to both

create formatted strings and parse strings.

• You can also provide your own patterns, if this is

not enough for you…

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Dates and Times

• Similarly as with numbers, dates and time are

represented differently.

• Also similarly, there is a DateFormat class, which

you can use to create standard date and time formats.

• Here again, you may customise – and you may

also define your own names for things such as weekdays etc.

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Messages containing variable parts

• Examples:
• 405,390 people have visited your

website since January 1, 1998. (1)

• The <devicename> number <devicenumber> has been
• activated. (2)
• Word order may change between languages, which may

make it impossible to correctly translate message (1) assuming that it is the text between the number and the date.

• In message (2) the word “activated” may require different

translation in some languages (e.g. French) depending on the gender of the word for the device name.

• Basic rule of thumb: If you can avoid messages containing

these variable parts, then do so!

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Class MessageFormat

• With the MessageFormat class you can define a

message template, which gives the message text and shows where to format the changing data and how.

• With ChoiceFormat, you can choose between

strings using based on a number you give as a parameter (this is particularly handy for managing plurals).

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Characters

• US Ascii – 7 bit
• ISO 8859-X where X is some digit – an 8-bit system – if 8th

bit is 0, then the first 7 bits represent a US Ascii character.

• Windows 125x codepages – similar to ISO 8859-X, but not

the same of course – typical Windows interoperability nightmare…

• Unicode – meant to represent all characters from all
• languages. Needs more bits (usually done with 16) but there

are several encoding schemes. Some, for instance, use two bytes (16 bits) for some characters and one byte (8 bits) for some…

• http://www.unicode.org/index.html

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Chinese and Japanese

• Thousands of symbols.
• Unicode can do – but you need more pixels on the

screen as well.

• In Japanese there are several writing systems.
• Text input can be done as followed:
• 1. The user types in the word in some phonetic

writing system based on latin characters.

• 2. The system shows the characters (there may

be many) matching the phonetic writing.

• 3. The user picks the right character.

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Korean

• In the Korean writing system (hangul), characters

are composed from parts based on which character follows which.

• There is a limited number of building blocks ie.

character parts (can’t remember, but maybe around 25).

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Writing order

• Latin – left to right.
• In Chinese and Japanese, traditional writing order is

top-down, and columns left-to-right.

• Nowadays adjusted to ordinary left-to-right.
• In Arabic and Hebrew, the text itself is written from

right-to-left, but all latin names (like yours, probably) are written left-to-right in the middle of right-to-left.

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Character properties

• Don’t do: if ((ch >= 'a' && ch <= 'z') || (ch >= 'A'

&& ch <= 'Z')) // ch is a letter

• In Java, char represents a Unicode character.
• You can use class Character to check for things

such as white space, digits, upper and lower case.

• E.g.: Character.isDigit(ch), Character.isLetter(ch),

Character.isLowerCase(ch)

• You can also use .getType() and predefined

constants to check things like: if (Character.getType('a') == Character.LOWERCASE_LETTER)

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Comparing characters and strings

• You can use the Collator class, e.g.:

Collator myCollator = Collator.getInstance(); if( myCollator.compare("abc", "ABC") < 0 ) System.out.println("abc is less than ABC"); else System.out.println("abc is greater than or equal to ABC");

• getInstance() takes also a locale as a parameter.
• You can customise the rules used in the

comparisons.

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Finding boundaries of words, sentences, etc.

• The boundaries may, of course, be defined

differently in different languages.

• Initialise BreakIterator with one of these

methods:

• getCharacterInstance
• getWordInstance
• getSentenceInstance
• getLineInstance
• E.g. BreakIterator sentenceIterator =

BreakIterator.getSentenceInstance(currentLocale);

• One BreakIterator only works with one type of

breaks.

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Colors, gestures, other symbols

• E.g. in far east there is a lot of symbolism in

colors, names, numbers, etc. (e.g. red is a good color, 4 is a bad number, etc.)

• Also, for instance hand gestures vary from one

place to another – what is good here may be bad elsewhere.

• Even in Europe there is variance. Consider tick

marks: x (good here, bad in UK), √ (not exactly like this, however good in UK, bad here).

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Higher cultural issues

• General customs
• How to do business
• How to be polite
• How to say no
• How to avoid ”loosing face” in far east.
• What to avoid in particular.
• These issues may have impact on software as well.

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Conclusions

• The final conclusion is:

”This is all quite complicated, and if you have to get deeper into these things, find someone who really knows.”

• When you start writing your software, think a bit
• n the need of globalisation.
• If you know that English (or Finnish) is sufficient,

then it makes life easier.

• If you know that globalisation is needed, you

should start globalising when you start writing your software!

• Java offers lots of resources. If you want to re-

invent the wheel, this may not be the best place.