[jbosstools-dev] Internationalising JBoss Tools

[Max Rydahl Andersen]

Hi,

I'm not so worried about size but if there at some point will be other
resources that needs translations i.e. images.

No, my worry is timing and that I don't think we should hold back GA  
releases
of JBoss Tools/JBDS just because l10n is not done yet. I think it makes
perfect sense to do the additional languages as language feature/fragment  
packs
that users can download or optimally get via an updatesite.

Regarding getting us to use the same name for the properties then I'm very
much for that; it makes translation and build scripts much more easy to  
maintain.
Sean - could you create issues in jira (and patches if you can ;) for  
those changes
you would like to see in our plugins to make translation easier ? Thanks.

About project structure then let us *start* by having it in  
trunk/localization/*
and have it mimic the structure of the module tree to have the proper  
"splits" for
the feature packs.

Let's get it started and get it concrete then we can readjust
the structure if needed. Sean, what do you think about that ?

/max

> Rob Stryker wrote:
>> Honestly, our product has so much code I'd be surprised if the
>> translatable strings were really an issue in terms of size.
>>
>> How many languages do we routinely translate into?  Most of my plugins
>> don't have more than 100 translatable strings, and several have much
>> less than that.
>
> For now, I gather that the target is about six languages, other than
> English.
>
>> I think it could be feasible to just include *all* translated
>> .properties files in the build with the proper language suffixes and let
>> eclipse / NLS load the proper one on their own. If you ever trace
>> through NLS you'd see how easy this is actually.
>
> True.  I already have to add the suffixes (eg messages_xxx.properties)
> to make the fragments anyway; I think org.eclipse.osgi.util.NLS uses
> virtually the same file naming scheme as java.util.ResourceBundle.
>
> In compressed jar form, the [xxx] pseudo-translation is about 270KB.
> Assuming the average translation is a more generous 500KB, that makes
> about 3 MB for the lot, so, no, not that huge.  On the other hand, the
> number of languages will probably grow with time, as will the string
> count.  Just something to keep in mind.  We could always shift some or
> all languages into lang-packs in the future, if we need to.
>
> Including the translated properties files in the existing
> bundles/plugins *would* save us from having to define lang-pack features.
>
> But I think it would still be safest to keep the translations separate
> from the source code, in a separate part of the source tree, and we
> still have to get the generated properties files on to the classpath at
> runtime/build-time.  That shouldn't be terribly difficult.
>



-- 
/max