Beyond the Chrome Building Multi-Lingual and Multi-Locale Business Processes

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Beyond the ChromeBuilding Multi-Lingual and
Multi-Locale Business Processes

• 24th Internationalization and Unicode Conference
• Presented by Addison P. Phillips
• Director, Globalization Architecture
• webMethods, Inc.

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What is the presentation about?

• Internationalization in a service oriented
  architecture
• What are business processes? How do they differ
  from applications?
• How do you approach internationalization of a
  business process?
• Differences between internationalizing GUI and
  processes.
• Data structuring basics
• I18N Effects on Processing

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What is this presentation about? (drooling
version)

• There is very little information about
  internationalization of complex enterprise
  systems.
• So Internationalization folks dont always have
  a good understanding of the issues.
• Which leads to wanting locales in thewrong
  places, misunderstandings withcore developers,
  etc.

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Shiny Chrome

• Chrome, of course, is the shiny metal stuff you
  most commonly see on automobiles.
• Chrome (in software) refers to the attractive,
  but not necessarily functional, user interface
  components. Like nifty buttons and graphics used
  to make up a website.

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Model-View-Controller Internationalization

• MVC is a traditional software pattern.
• In MVC
• Models contain the datastructures and most of
  thebusiness logic.
• Controllers receive input anddecide which
  actions to take(routing).
• Views contain the user interface components (or
  chrome).

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Shiny I18N

• Internationalization mostly deals with
  presentation and input problems
• Localizability and resource management (View)
• Formatting objects as strings (View)
• Validation of input (Controller)
• Date and timezone issues (View, Controller)
• Character encoding issues (View, Controller)
• Common internationalization rarely applies to the
  model.
• Middleware, platform and operating environment
  architects rely on this fact to avoid
  internationalization.

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And A Good Thing Too

• Late localization, formatting, and validation are
  a good thing.
• Separation of presentation from logic.
• Separation of presentation from data model.
• Locale and culturally neutral business logic
  (models).
• Deliver language according the user requirements.
• But
• What about that nagging feeling that
  internationalization also applies to middleware
  and back-end systems?

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Whats a Business Process?

• Generally, a composite application, rather than a
  discrete collection of logic
• May be composed of many applications.
• Service or task oriented.
• May incorporate human interactive steps.

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Process a Purchase Order

• Involves many applications
• Finance, ERP, Customer Profile, B2B, CRM, etc.
• Highly distributed
• Complex
• Mutable

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Business Processes

• Business processes have three parts
• Tasks" or "steps".
• "Clients"
• "Documents" or "messages"

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Relating Processes to MVC

• Surface appearance the process is all model.
• Complex processes each task may have
• One or more viewers
• One or more controllers
• Its own model
• Web service orchestration

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International Business Processes

• What are the requirements for making a business
  process sensitive to differences in the way your
  business operates in different markets (country,
  state, city, language, social grouping, etc.)?
• Modify your documents (data structures) to
  contain the necessary information in the
  necessary format.
• Modify your business logic to encapsulate or
  reflect global business conditions.
• Intelligently model user preferences, partner
  profiles, and other metadata to tailor processing
  and business logic to a specific clients needs.

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Documents

• These are the data structures in a business
  process.
• Real documents XML files, flatfiles, EDI, etc.
• SOAP documents
• Message broker or message queue message (as with
  JMS or MQ)
• Might even be something like an EJB or data bean.
• Documents form the model on which the business
  process operates.

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International Implications for the Model

• Need to handle cultural differences.
• Different fields for different countries, markets
  or regions.
• Different data routing, processing or logic may
  apply.
• Different models may be needed.
• Culture, region, locality, etc. may apply.

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Issues with Data Structures

• Documents and data structures shouldnt include
  locales.
• Basic datatypes are (mostly) locale-neutral.
  (cf. XML Schema, Java, etc.)
• If a data structure is composed of locale neutral
  types, how is it locale affected?
• Why is it designed in a locale affected way?
• Documents may include language identifiers for
  text.
• Why do you have text there? Can you do late(r)
  localization?
• Allow multiple resolution.

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For Example Currency

• ltpricegt123.45lt/pricegt
• ltpricegt
• ltamountgt123.45lt/amountgt
• ltlocalegten-USlt/localegt
• lt/pricegt

ltpricegt ltamountgt123.45lt/amountgt
ltcurrencygtUSDlt/currencygt lt/pricegt
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For Example Postal Address

• ltaddressgt
• ltaddr1gt123 Main St.lt/addr1gt
• ltcitygtSan Joselt/citygt
• ltstategtCAlt/stategt
• ltzipgt12345lt/zipgt
• ltlocalegten-USlt/localegt
• lt/addressgt

ltaddressgt ltcountrygtUSlt/countrygt
ltaddr1gt123 Main St.lt/addr1gt ltcitygtSan
Joselt/citygt ltprovincegtCAlt/provincegt
ltpostalcodegt12345lt/postalcodegt lt/addressgt
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For Example SOAPFault

• ltenvFaultgt
• ltenvCodegt
• ltenvValuegtenvSenderlt/envValuegt
• ltenvSubcodegt
• ltenvValuegtmMessageTimeoutlt/envValuegt
• lt/envSubcodegt
• lt/envCodegt
• ltenvReasongt
• ltenvText xmllang"en"gtSender Timeout
• lt/envTextgt
• lt/envReasongt

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Consider Global Requirements

• Need to consider all of the different
  requirements for separate applications with the
  same data structure.

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Modify Business Logic for Global Requirements

• De-normalization of processing
• Regulatory
• Cultural
• Business Practices
• Routing
• Etc.
• Routing based on customer profile.
• Routing based on user profile.
• Rule differences based on market.
• and so on.

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Process Execution

• Internationalization affects process execution
• Collation sequences for result sets and queries
• Natural language processing
• Differentiating templates from alternate
  content
• Processing rules depending on
• Who the user or trading partner is.
• Where the transaction is taking place.
• Tax regime, legal authority, local calendar
• Etc.
• The interplay of all of the above.
• Policy based execution.

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Execution Policies in Service Oriented
Architectures

• How are user preferences propagated?
• Profiles
• Sessions
• Cookies
• Explicitly in each request
• What makes sense?
• The interesting data is usually application
  driven.
• May need a short-hand and a long-hand version.

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Airplane Reservation

• Things you can select
• Start, destination, seating, meal, reminder
  email, route, class, etc.
• Things you might prefer
• SFO, IAD, aisle, regular, yes, direct, business,
  etc.
• Things you might infer from a locale
• Language of the reminder email?

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User Metadata

• Vegetarian, non-smoking, blonde, sports
  car-locale
• vs.
• en-US
• Maybe users dont have locales either?
• Maybe locales are application specific?
• What does your application do on the Front Door?

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Internationalization Lost in the Fog

• If it doesnt use locales and has all this
  personalization stuff and data structuring stuff,
  then is it still internationalization? Isnt it
  just good development?
• Globalization is a fundamental architectural
  approach. It is how you think when you are
  writing the software. It is not a feature.
  (Glen Perkins, Globalization Architect,
  Macromedia)

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QA