The Internationalization Service in IBM WebSphere
Intended Audience: |
Managers, Software Engineers, Systems Analysts |
Session Level: |
Intermediate, Advanced |
Presently none of the established and well-respected client-server
architectures like CORBA, Java" 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), or Microsoft" DCOM provide
any infrastructure for distributed internationalization. All of them tacitly assume that
in multi-lingual environments, a server may freely impose its own locale and time zone
on all the locale- and time zone-sensitive computation requests from clients.
The Internationalization Service, a potentially new CORBA Common Object Service,
provides a sound, robust, and flexible architectural infrastructure for properly
localizing heterogeneous client-server applications distributed over IIOP. The
internationalization service makes the 'internationalization context' available to the
business methods. The internationalization context consists of the locale and time zone
information under which a business method should execute. The internationalization
service transparently creates, and propagates the internationalization context during
business method invocations. No extra parameters are needed in the method interfaces for
accessing the internationalization contexts. With minimal extra programming effort in
the form of a Java Naming and Directory Interface" (JNDI) lookup, a business method can
obtain the locale and time zone information from the internationalization context using
the APIs provided by internationalization service. The locale and time zone can be used
to properly localize relevant computations in distributed environments.
The present paper discusses the principal technical considerations behind the
development of localized distributed client-server applications. The design of
internationalization service is discussed in detail. The use of the internationalization
service in IBM WebSphereŽ for developing internationalized J2EE applications is
illustrated by appropriate examples. The ongoing and future internationalization work in
client-server environments is also highlighted.
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