From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Jul 12 2003 - 17:45:35 EDT
On Saturday, July 12, 2003 4:17 PM, Jony Rosenne <rosennej@qsm.co.il> wrote:
> What has "iw" to with Hebrew?
>
> I wasn't involved with the change, but I'm glad it was done. Java and
> other systems probably still use it because they never bothered to
> check the latest version of 639. I know for certain that this was the
> case with one of the major computer vendors.
In the case of Java, I don't think so. Sun has certainly maintained the
language code simply to avoid breaking existing localizations to
Hebrew of Java-written software, waiting probably for a better way to
locate locales than the fixed "locales path resolution algorithm" which
is part of its core Classes since the beginning.
As long as Java core classes will not use a locale resolver that allows
tuning the resolution algorithm used to load resource bundles, while
also maintaining the compatibility with the existing softwares that
assume that Hebrew resources are loaded with the "iw" language code,
Sun will not change this code.
In IBM ICU4J, there is such an extended resolver, but Sun takes a
long time to approve such proposals, and have it first accepted,
documented, balloted and voted in its JCP program. Of course
Java already includes some parts of ICU, but other things are in
ICU4J are difficult now to integrate in Java, simply because IBM
forgot to modularize ICU so that it can be integrated slowly.
Accepting ICU4J as part of the core is a big decision choice,
because ICU4J is quite large, and there are certainly developers
for Java that would not accept to have 1 aditional MB of data and
classes loaded in each JVM (particularly because the integration
of ICU would affect a lot of core classes for the Java2 platform
now also used for small devices).
For example, it is impossible to integrate the ICU's Normalizer
class in Java without also importing the UChar class and all its
related services for UString, such as transliterators, and
advanced features such as the UCA tailoring rules run-time
compiler. Some ICU open-sourcers, as well as its users seem
to think now that the modularization of ICU is an important but
complex project.
-- Philippe. Spams non tolérés: tout message non sollicité sera rapporté à vos fournisseurs de services Internet.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Jul 12 2003 - 18:44:40 EDT