In today's global market, it is crucial to develop and maintain programs that support a wide variety of national languages. Not surprisingly, customers prefer software and web pages in their own languages; studies confirm that this leads to increased sales. Unicode is the foundation for dealing with text world-wide: it has been adopted by ALL major software vendors and modern standards such as XML, Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, and CORBA.

ICU is the premier Unicode-enablement software library, providing a full range of services for supporting internationalization - especially in server environments. ICU is principally developed by IBM, and used in IBM products, but is also freely available as open-source. It provides cross-platform C, C++ and Java APIs, with a thread-safe programming model. ICU includes the following features:

The ICU project is licensed under the X License (see also the x.org original), which is compatible with GPL but non-viral.

This paper will provide an overview of the ICU features, with special emphasis on the new features in the ICU 2.6 release (June 2003), and also discuss the planned features in the upcoming ICU 2.8 release (2003 Q4).