September 15, 2007

icu4j 3.8 final released

the final version of icu4j version 3.8 has just been released. to recap what's in this release:
  • uses the latest cldr 1.5.0.1 locale data
  • the long discussed rule based timezone changes which gives us the ability to read and write timezone data in RFC2445 VTIMEZONE format as well as also providing access to Olson timezone transitions! this is something many people have been needing for quite some time now, this is going to be very useful
  • tawainese calendar (a flavor of gregorian calendar that numbers years since 1912AD)
  • the Indian National Calendar (more complicated flavor of the gregorian calendar, eg it's synched up with the gregorian calendar's leap years but the extra day is added to the first month, Chaitra which starts march 22 on gregorian calendar--so, yup, it's complicated)
  • charset conversion bugs were fixed and CESU-8, UTF-7 and ISCII converters have been added. also some conversion speed improvements. the UTF-7 one will be useful for email (bounce) handling
  • a new MessageFormat type for plurals was added
  • a pretty useful new DurationFormat class was added so you can format messages over a duration in time such as "2 days from now" or "3 hours ago"
  • also the MessageFormat class will now take named arguments instead of just arrays (too bad now that coldfusion 8's javacast got a shot of steroids)
  • new BIDI stuff (which i still need to investigate)

next month i'll be adding the new calendars as CFCs to the usual bits. i'll also be doing some significant changes to most of the i18n formatting methods to take better advantage of the calendar, etc. keywords (en_GB@calendar=indian,currency=EUR) on the ULocale class (icu4j's super cool locale class).

unfortunately the persian calendar still appears to be only in icu4c (C/C++) only.

Labels:

posted by Paul Hastings @ 9:18 PM 0 comments

August 09, 2007

icu4j 3.8 draft released

a draft of icu4j version 3.8 has just been released. what's so hot about this release? well a lot actually:
  • it uses the latest and greatest cldr 1.5 locale data
  • the long discussed rule based timezone changes which gives us the ability to read and write timezone data in RFC2445 VTIMEZONE format as well as also providing access to Olson timezone transitions! this is stuff many people have been looking for, this is going to be very useful
  • tawainese calendar (which i never knew existed, looks like a flavor of gregorian calendar that numbers years since 1912AD)
  • the Indian National Calendar (ditto though looks like a more complicated flavor of the gregorian calendar, eg it's synched up with the gregorian calendar's leap years but the extra day is added to the first month, Chaitra which starts march 22 on gregorian calendar--so, yup, it's complicated)
  • charset conversion bugs were fixed and CESU-8, UTF-7 and ISCII converters have been added. also some conversion speed improvements. i think the UTF-7 one looks pretty useful
  • a new MessageFormat type for plurals was added, looks like some eastern european languages have complicated rules for plurals
  • a new DurationFormat class so you can format messages over a duration in time such as "2 days from now" or "3 hours ago" (this one looks useful)
  • also the MessageFormat class will now take named arguments instead of just arrays (too bad now that coldfusion 8's javacast got a shot of steroids)
  • bunch of new BIDI stuff (which need some investigating)
i'll be adding the new calendars as CFCs to the usual bits as soon as i do enough background research on them to understand any "quirks". i'll also be doing some significant changes to most of the i18n formatting methods to take better advantage of the calendar, etc. keywords (en_GB@calendar=indian,currency=EUR) on the ULocale class (icu4j's super cool locale class).

looks like a persian calendar was also added but appears to be only in icu4c (C/C++) only for the time being.

wow, fun times in the old town tonite (it's actually in the AM in bangkok but you get the idea).

Labels: ,

posted by Paul Hastings @ 7:22 AM 0 comments

May 02, 2007

icu4j 3.6.1 maintenance release

if you're using icu4j 3.6 and supporting chinese locales you should grab this upgrade. specifically if you support zh_CN, zh_TW,zh_HK,zh_MO, or zh_SG you'll probably want this upgrade as the actual locale data is picked up from the ICU locale "zh" data bundle which does not contain any regional specific data such as currency. if i understand correctly, the locale data was keyed off scripts, for instance zh_Hans_CN or zh_Hant_TW.

if you're still on older versions of icu4j, you should be ok as this is a new bug introduced in 3.6.

Labels:

posted by Paul Hastings @ 11:19 AM 0 comments