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J2ME for I18N embedded product?

 
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Michael,
I am interested in seeing your book - maybe it will shed some light on a mystery I encountered in a project last year.
I joined a team at the very end on its development cycle. They had developed a J2SE or J2ME-based embedded application that had to support 7 different languages (human customer languages, that is). They had been developing it as a J2ME system because they had to fit the software on a flash memory with limited space. Unfortunately, they didn't realize until the very end that their J2ME system did not contain any of the foreign language unicode libraries (resource bundles, etc.). Although the deployed product would be capable of downloading a language set, the developers did not see how to get the J2ME application to dynamically change language (even if the 2nd language bundle could fit).
So, they gave up on meeting the hardware and cost constraints and opted to change everything to J2SE with a much larger memory. Ultimately, the project was cancelled because it no longer met the business case.
What would you make of this turn of events? Is the I18N issue a real problem in terms of J2ME and space? ... or did they just make a bad mistake.
Thanks in advance!
[ January 21, 2004: Message edited by: john prieur ]
 
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Most J2ME apps are designed for a specific language, so I18N is not a big issue. But for applications that require dynamic language swtiches, you would have implement your own "Resource bundle" of some sort. It is not very hard. My book does not cover this. But Vartan Piroumian's "Wireless J2ME Platform Programming" has an excellent chapter on this.
Also, the Sun 2ME blueprint application demonstrates how to develop the same app that runs in both english and japanese environments. The J2ME blueprint application is available from here:
http://java.sun.com/blueprints/wireless/
For an introduction to the blueprint application, check out my article:
http://www.enterprisej2me.com/pages/yuan/articles/sun-06202003.html
 
Juan Rolando Prieur-Reza
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Originally posted by Michael Yuan:
... you would have implement your own "Resource bundle" of some sort. It is not very hard. ...


Simply adding resource bundles would not have solved that team's problem:
They were running on RedHat Linux and had removed the actual foreign language character sets in order to fir their application on the chip.
Without that, simple string substitutions (which is what resource bundles were being used for) would not have worked. They really had a design problem.
 
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