July 26, 2004

Turkish i18n

if you do i18n work you know that Turkish is often a ticking timebomb, and Turkish s/w end-users are certainly a long suffering lot (for example cf still doesn't run 100% on servers in Turkish locales). tex texin has pretty good explaination of the main issues. his article includes:
  • an overview of Turkish characters and encodings,
  • a brief discussion of the Turkish language problem and solutions,
  • and just for fun, a brief history of the Turkish language is also included.
pretty good reading.

July 16, 2004

icu4j news

i meant to get this public sooner but got busy. there's an issue with date formatting in the latest version (3.0) of icu4j. in version 2.8, you could normally get fully localized date formats including month/day names and localized digits (الخميس, ٢٧ جمادى الأولى, ١٤٢٥) in version 3.0 the digits aren't localized (الخميس, 27 جمادى الأولى, 1425). it seems the numberFormat class was using the default locale rather than the calendar's to format numbers. you can read more about these if you care to here: IBM's found & fixed these, but not yet updated the jar. you can see the bug in action here. beyond that bug, that page also shows of spike's oh so cool classpath technique. its actually loading & using two different versions of icu4j, none of which are in mx server's classpath. yeah i know, i'm easily impressed, but to my mind spike's technique is cool. in more icu4j news, IBM's also just announced the release of a new version of rbManager. we use this tool a lot--it's the cat's pajama's of rb tools.