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Moap is based on Struts which offers good support for internationalisation based on java i18n. The current realease already take advantage of these feaures.

How does it work ?

The default user interface is stored in a resource bundle. A resource bundle is a file containing name/value pairs. The resource bundle for Moap is called WebResources.properties.

The Struts tags loads text out of the bundle by on the name and the correct value is retrieved based on your locale settings.

Name/value pairs in the English resource bundle might look like this: pagekey.paramkey.yes = Yes
The German resource bundle contains the same names, but different values: pagekey.paramkey.yes = Ja

Localisation

Making your own resource bundle

Making your own translation involves copying the English resource bundle, renaming the file and finally translating its contents.

You'll need to rename the file to be specific to your locale.

For example, the German resource bundle is named "WebResources_de.properties" because "de" is the language code for German. For French, the file would be called "WebResources_fr.properties". A list of language codes can be found at: http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/langhome.html

Save your resource bundle in ascii

When translating from English, you might need to use special characters for you language (for example, Germans use characters like ä, ü, or ß). Unfortunately, all resource bundle files must be saved in ASCII format which doesn't allow for many international characters.

It's recommened you work on your translation in a text editor that supports all characters in your language. After finishing your translation, use the "native2ascii" tool (built in to Java) to convert international characters to the ASCII format.

The purpose of native2ascii tool is to generate Unicode characters for a given set of characters in a file. To support intenationalization java expects all characters to be in Unicode format in the properties file. The alphabets already encoded in Unicode are listed here : http://www.unicode.org/charts/

Here's how you use the native2ascii tool: native2ascii -encoding XXX WebResources_native.properties WebResources_YY.properties

The "-encoding XXX" parameter is optional.
If you don't specify it, Java will use the default encoding value, taken from System property "file.encoding". If you do specify the encoding (XXX) of the input file, it must be taken from the first column of the table of supported encodings in the Supported Encodings document that can be found here: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/intl/encoding.doc.html

The supported encodings have greatly increased between 1.3.1 and 1.4.2 jsdk. Mainly, native2ascii supports : UTF-8, ISCII91, BIG5, Shift-JIS...and many others !

-- JordaneRollin - 11 Feb 2004