INTERNATIONALIZATION ASPECTS IN DEVELOPING WEB APPLICATIONSFOR CENTRAL AND EAST EUROPE

Rok Žontar, Jernej Novak, Andrej Krajnc, Marjan Heričko

•Agenda• Introduction and motivation• Why develop multi language

applications?• Problems and difficulties• Some good practices• Conclusion

•Why develop multi-lingual?

•Slovenia

•Some facts

Slovenia

2 million

20.000 km2

$ 25.000

4

Yes

Russia

10 billion

17.000.000 km2

$ 15.000

14

No

Population:

Area:

GDP per capita:

Neighboring countries:

Played at the FIFA World Cup:

•Motivation and definition• Small country• Area with high cultural diversity• Focus on foreign markets

„Internationalization is a development process of content, applications and specifications in a way that ensures it will work well with, or can be easily adapted for, users from any culture, region or language.“

[W3C]

•Bad practices• Separate applications for each

language• Copy backend, change frontend• Only few applications support multi

language natively

• Drawbacks:o Time consumingo Hard to maintaino Different look and feel

•How to develop?

•User interface

•Middle tier

•Database

•Database• Different patterns for storing data

o Attribute per languageo Language identification by foreign keyo Separate entities (independent,

dependent and language)

• Different alphabetso Latino Cyrillic

• Solution: Unicode

•Middle tier• Native support for multi-language

and Unicode in all mayor application servers and runtimes (Java, Microsoft .Net)

• Lack of support in application frameworks

• Additional development of multi-language functionality

• Adoption of services to provide different functionalities according to the user’s location

• Difficult data retrieval and manipulation

•User interface• Most affected part of

internationalization• Compositional changes• Incorporate images instead of plain

text

•Templating frameworks• HTML generation based on

templates using string substitution• Many free and open-source

• A solution using XSL transformation

•Don‘t trust the browser• Many applications rely on the

browsers‘ locale• Most of the time these are incorrect• Users are unaware of these settings• Develop fallback mechanisms to

detect users’ languages

•What about AJAX?• AJAX = JavaScript + Web Services• Additional data about the language

is needed• JavaScript templating frameworks

Request

Data

•Conclusion• An international web presence is

crucial for businesses and organizations

• Developing multi language web applications is a difficult job

• Following some basic guidelines helps to reduce the difficulty

• Plan additional time for content translation

•QUESTIONS ?Большое спасибо!