Viewing by month: June 2005
Globalization Plan - Other Issues
Posted on Jun 07, 2005
This is excerpted from a report I developed - portions have been removed where they may be irrelevant or confidential. Note that when "we" or "our" refers to my employer)
Collation – Different languages sort data differently and in some instances within our sites it may be an important consideration. In some cases, we are sorting by non-string data (for instance, news is sorted by date). However, products are often sorted alphanumerically by their display name (after taking into account the priority). As mentioned earlier, this can be handled within the SQL syntax using COLLATE. Nonetheless, instances where internal ColdFusion sorting functionality is used will have to be accommodated (possibly through the inclusion of IBM's ICU4J). I am not aware of any such cases at this point in time however.
Searching – To my knowledge, we are not using ColdFusion's built-in Verity search technology at the moment, but it has been discussed as an option to replace the limitations and inefficiencies of LIKE queries. Thus, searching may have to be accommodated in the long term but is not a pressing issue in the near term.
Calendars – Given the functionality on existing sites, accommodating non-Gregorian calendar systems may not be an urgent consideration. I am not aware of any items that would be date-sensitive from a user's perspective. Still, it is important to note, should additional functionality be requested that requires calendar considerations, that locales such as Japan and China, for example, use non-Gregorian calendar systems. This may also require incorporating functionality available through leveraging the capabilities built into ICU4J.
Time Zones – In much the same manner as calendars, I do not believe we have any time-sensitive information currently in use on our sites. The recommended solution, should this be required in the longer term, is storing time information in Greenwich Mean Time and converting it to the user's time zone.
BIDI Locales – BIDI stands for bi-directional in relation to those locales that require that a page be oriented from right-to-left. As of writing this, I am not aware of intentions to support BIDI locales such as Hebrew or Arabic. Should this be a long term goal though, it will affect the entire design and layout process.
Addresses – I do not believe this is yet a consideration given that contact information is collected via an outside vendor (and I do not believe we have intentions of supporting this for international at the moment). Should this change, address collection forms and databases will have to be built taking into account non-U.S. formatted addresses.
Measurement – While product information occasionally refers to the objects measurement, differences in measurement can be accommodated in translation at the moment as (I believe) measurement data is not stored independently.
Globalization Plan - Resource Bundles
Posted on Jun 07, 2005
This is excerpted from a report I developed - portions have been removed where they may be irrelevant or confidential. Note that when "we" or "our" refers to my employer)
A resource bundle is a collection of key/value combinations used to translate text data throughout the site. This functions in much the same way that our current Legal component does except that it separates out key/value combinations into locale specific bundles and does not require a knowledge of ColdFusion to maintain (in many respects, the current translation spreadsheets are similar to resource bundles though not directly usable within ColdFusion). In addition, the use of resource bundles open up the possibility of using tools such as IBM's RB Manager to manage building and maintaining resource bundles. There are also pre-built tools available that are both free and open-source to assist in implementing resource bundles in ColdFusion.
Globalization Plan - Character Encoding
Posted on Jun 07, 2005
This is excerpted from a report I developed - portions have been removed where they may be irrelevant or confidential. Note that when "we" or "our" refers to my employer)
As briefly mentioned above, character encoding is an issue when discussing adding additional locales. However, all available documentation from Macromedia or otherwise recommends using Unicode and, in particular, using ColdFusion's default UTF-8 Unicode encoding, which uses variable length encoding to limit bandwidth. Macromedia also recommends that your pages be encoded with a byte-order mark (BOM) that indicates that the page has been encoded in UTF-8 (this is supported by Dreamweaver, via the Page Properties Document Encoding property, and Eclipse, though it appears may not be a default in either). If this is not done, a cfprocessingdirective tag is necessary to establish the page encoding at the beginning of every page that has non-default encoding.
Globalization Plan - Locales
Posted on Jun 07, 2005
This is excerpted from a report I developed - portions have been removed where they may be irrelevant or confidential. Note that when "we" or "our" refers to my employer)
It is important to note that the brief discussion in my prior post does not refer to locales. Currently our support for internationalization takes into account language (excepting the Asian languages recently added) and a unique subset of products for each location. On the one hand they are more specific than locales in that a locale is not always (although they can be made to be) country specific. For the most part however, the locations are more generalized in that they do not take into account other cultural aspects that are associated with locales, for example calendars, currency and collation; nor do they currently take into account the issue of character encoding.
Globalization Plan - Introduction
Posted on Jun 07, 2005
I was asked to research and develop a report on the expanding globalization initiative at my current employer. After researching the available material (in particular the "Advanced ColdFusion MX 7 Application Development" book), I put together a final 7 page report. I have stripped that report of irrelevant or potentially confidential information to publish here as it may be useful to someone in a similar situation.