Internationalization of Java Platform

1
Internationalization of Java Platform

• Presenter Ataru Nakazawa
• Advisor Xiaoping Jia
• Date January 23, 2004

2
Overview

• Introduction
• Issues
• Unicode 4.0
• Research Design
• Problem and challenge
• Work Plan
• References

3
Introduction

• How many countries are in the world?
• How many languages are in the world?
• How many people are in the world?

4
Answers

• How many countries are in the world?
• 192 countries (U.S. Department of State)
• How many languages are in the world?
• It is difficult to give an exact figure of
  the number of languages that exist in the world.
  According to Ethnologue, it is usually
  estimated between 3,000 and 8,000.
• How many people are in the world?
• 6,328,406,644 (U.S census Bureau)

5
What is Internationalization?

• Internationalization is the process of
  designing an application so that it can be
  adapted to various languages and regions without
  engineering changes.
• i18n

6
What is Localization?

• Localization is the process of adapting
  software for a specific region or language by
  adding locale-specific components and translating
  text.
• l10n
• Example

l10n
Buongiorno (Italian)
Hello (English)
7
Issues(Culturally Dependent Data)

• Messages (e.g. English, Italian, Spanish and
  Japanese)
• Dates (e.g. November/14/2003, 14 / 11 /2003)
• Times
• Numbers
• Currencies (e.g. , , , )
• Measurements (e.g. length, weight, capacity,
  temperature)
• Phone numbers
• Postal addresses
• Labels on GUI components

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Issues that has been solved

• Locale
• Formatting Messages
• Character Sets and Unicode
• Collation
• Fonts
• Graphical User Interfaces
• Input Methods

9
Issues that has not been solved

• Unicode 4.0 Support
• Complex Text Enhancement
• Character Converter Framework
• Input Method Framework
• My research is going to be the Unicode 4.0
  support in Java

10
Unicode 4.0 support in Java

• Currently, Unicode standard version 4.0 and Java
  2 Standard Edition 1.4.2 are released (As of
  January 5 , 2004). But the J2SE1.4.2 supports
  only Unicode 3.0. The Unicode 4.0 is not being
  supported by the J2SE 1.4.2.
• Java 1.5 is going to be released in this coming
  summer of 2004. It is going to support Unicode
  3.1 but Unicode 4.0.

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Unsupported Unicode Blocks

• 47,188 new character assignments were made to
  the Unicode standard version 4.0
• from version 3.0.
• 38 unsupported Unicode blocks.
• http//students.depaul.edu/anakazaw/se690/Unsupp
  ortedUnicodeBlocks.txt

12
Research Design

• The java.lang.Character and java.lang.Character.
  UnicodeBlock classes need updating to provide
  access to the new characters and blocks.
• The normalization algorithm, used by the Collator
  object, needs modification so that collation and
  string comparison are carried out correctly.
• The case mapping rules used to perform case
  mappings between upper and lower case letters
  need upgrading to handle new characters.
• The character encoding converters need
  modification to support these new characters.

13
Problem and Challenge

• 32 bits character assignments were made since
  Unicode 4.0. That is why supporting the new
  Unicode characters that are bigger than 16 bits
  would be the hardest part.

14
Work Plan

• Design
• January, February, March
• Testing
• April

15
References

• http//java.sun.com, Java Tutorial, Sun
  Microsystems, 2004.
• http//www.oreilly.com, Java Internationalization,
  O'Reilly, 2001.
• http//www.unicode.org, Unicode Standard Version
  4.0, Unicode Inc, 2003.
• http//java.sun.com, Java Internationalization
  Forum.

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