Target Audience: Manager, Software Engineer, Systems Analyst

Level of Session: Beginner

Global markets are becoming more and more important to the success of software developers. As the American and Western European markets reach maturity, more companies are finding that the areas of large growth lie overseas.

Selling computer software in a foreign market requires translating its text and customizing its behavior and screen displays to be in the user's native language and to conform to that user's expectations. It's important that software be written in such a way as to make this possible without having to rewrite or recompile the program. Making it possible to translate a program without recoding is called "internationalization."

This talk will explore the basics of software internationalization and show how to internationalize software in Java. The Java language and class libraries have one of the most extensive arrays of features to support software internationalization available. This talk will look at all of them and show why they are important and how they are used. It will also show how to avoid common pitfalls that make a program much more difficult to internationalize.