Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter
9.
Internationalizing
and
Localizing
Web
Applications
The process of preparing an application to support more than one language and data format
is called
internationalization
.
Localization
is the process of adapting an internationalized
application to support a specific region or locale. Examples of locale-dependent informa-
tion include messages and user interface labels, character sets and encoding, and date and
currency formats. Although all client user interfaces should be internationalized and local-
ized, these processes are particularly important for web applications because of the global
nature of the web.
The following topics are addressed here:
• “
Java Platform Localization Classes
” on page
183
• “
Providing Localized Messages and Labels
”
on page
184
• “
Date and Number Formatting
”
on page
187
• “
Character Sets and Encodings
”
on page
188
Java Platform Localization Classes
javase/6/docs/api/java/util/Locale.html
)
represents a specific geograph-
ical, political, or cultural region. The string representation of a locale consists of the in-
ternational standard two-character abbreviation for language and country and an optional
variant, separated by underscore (
_
) characters. Examples of locale strings include
fr
(French),
de_CH
(Swiss German), and
en_US_POSIX
(English on a POSIX-compliant
platform).
sourceBundle.html
). A resource bundle contains key-value pairs, where the key
uniquely identifies a locale-specific object in the bundle. A resource bundle can be backed
by a text file (properties resource bundle) or a class (list resource bundle) containing the
pairs. You construct a resource bundle instance by appending a locale string representation
to a base name.
The Duke's Tutoring application contains resource bundles with the base name
mes-
sages.properties
for the locales
pt
(Portuguese),
de
(German),
es
(Spanish), and
