Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
C H A P T E R 6
Globalizing the Application
I am sure there has been at least one occasion when you've taken a flight to a foreign country, proudly
presented your painstakingly crafted application consisting of hundreds of web pages and a beautiful
UI, only to be asked if everything could be in Thai. No? You've been lucky!
Contrary to popular opinion, more than 60% of the world does not speak English. Moreover, each
country has different locality specifications: Americans use the USD currency, the English use the pound
or Euro, and quite interestingly, the French use the comma symbol instead of the dot in their numerals.
In today's environment where the Internet and the rise of cloud computing has truly brought the
world closer together, it is inevitable that your application will be used by people from different parts of
the world. It is thus important to consider more than just your own country or locality when developing
applications, and especially when developing applications to be deployed on the Internet. Globalization,
via Oracle's language and locale features, is the answer.
Globalization support consists of the following areas:
•
Entering of double-byte characters such as those used in Japanese or Chinese.
•
Translation of an application user interface into various languages.
•
Display and data entry formats for currencies, time zones, and date/time values.
Recipes in this chapter explore these three areas of concern and the various facilities APEX provides to
address them.
6-1. Setting up for Double-Byte Character Input
Problem
You have created forms that accept input in double-byte character sets such as those used in Chinese
and other languages. Not only must your fields accept such characters, but you must enable users to key
in such characters using an English-language keyboard.
Solution
To set up a Windows 7-based operating system to support data entry in Chinese, follow these steps:
