San Jose, California September 2002 What is ICU? Roadmap and Myths Helena Shih Chapman ICU Development Manager IBM Globalization Center of Competency

What is ICU? Roadmap and Myths San Jose, California September nd International Unicode Conference2 Agenda What is ICU? Architecture Overview Significant New ICU Features Near Future Features Common Misunderstandings about ICU ICU – what you should know Globalization Gotcha’s References Q and A

What is ICU? Roadmap and Myths San Jose, California September nd International Unicode Conference3 What is ICU? Internationalization libraries for C, C++, Java* –Open source – non-viral –Sponsored by IBM *Sun’s Java licenses an earlier ICU version; ICU4J updates it. Unicode Standard compliant –full supplementary support Cross-platform; extensible and customizable High performance and thread-safe –Multiple locales in same thread – simultaneously

What is ICU? Roadmap and Myths San Jose, California September nd International Unicode Conference4 ICU Features Unicode text handling Character set conversions (700+) Collation & Searching Locales (170+) Resource Bundles Calendar & Time zones

What is ICU? Roadmap and Myths San Jose, California September nd International Unicode Conference5 ICU Features Breaks: character, word, line, & sentence Formatting –Date & time –Messages –Numbers & currencies Transforms –Normalization –Casing –Transliterations Complex Text Layout Engine

What is ICU? Roadmap and Myths San Jose, California September nd International Unicode Conference6 Architecture Overview Locale Based Services –Locale is an identifier, not a container Object in C++ and Java, char* in C –Default locale is set to the platform locale Resource inheritance

What is ICU? Roadmap and Myths San Jose, California September nd International Unicode Conference7 Architecture Overview Open and Close Service Model –Better performance by avoiding setup costs per operation ICU Threading Model –Multiple versions in use simultaneously –Large resources shared in read-only cache

What is ICU? Roadmap and Myths San Jose, California September nd International Unicode Conference8 Architecture Overview Data Driven Services –Customize at build-time or run-time –Interchange with other platforms; same results on each –Rule-based Collation, Word-breaks, Transforms –Pattern-based Formats, UnicodeSet –Table-based Character Conversion

What is ICU? Roadmap and Myths San Jose, California September nd International Unicode Conference9 Architecture Overview – ICU4C Simple Error Handling –C++ subset for portability –Support for multi-threaded environment Version Management –Multiple versions at the same time –Data and library versioning String Buffer Management –Preflighting and overflow protection

What is ICU? Roadmap and Myths San Jose, California September nd International Unicode Conference10 New Common ICU Features Unicode 3.2 Update Supplementary Character Support Dual Currency Support UCA Compliant Collation Fast Unicode Normalization Customizable RuleBasedBreakIterator Many Other Enhancements…

What is ICU? Roadmap and Myths San Jose, California September nd International Unicode Conference11 New ICU4C Features Character Set Conversion Enhancements –Alias Management –Tighter Unicode conformance –Better compression scheme for Unicode Memory Management –Load and unload ICU libraries –Root UObject: new and delete overwrite Complete Unicode 3.2 Properties

What is ICU? Roadmap and Myths San Jose, California September nd International Unicode Conference12 Near-Future Plans POSIX Style Compatibility Interface Plug-in APIs for Linguistics Engines (runtime) Service Registration Flexible User Data Loading Mechanism ICU4C and ICU4J Feature Sync-up Further Performance and Robustness Enhancements Please note that this list is subject to change!

What is ICU? Roadmap and Myths San Jose, California September nd International Unicode Conference13 Misconceptions about ICU The X license agreement is viral and too open. ICU4C distribution size is very large. ICU4C converter names and aliases are ambiguous and misleading. I cannot use multiple versions of ICU4C on the same machine. ICU Unicode type is not the same as platform native Unicode type. There is no way to process Unicode characters with Standard Input/Output in ICU4C. ICU is not ported to the platforms I use.

What is ICU? Roadmap and Myths San Jose, California September nd International Unicode Conference14 ICU – what you should know ICU default locale is not connected to OS locale utilities ICU resource bundle is platform independent Multiple versions of ICU can be linked to the same application

What is ICU? Roadmap and Myths San Jose, California September nd International Unicode Conference15 Globalization Be Aware wchar_t is not consistently defined across platforms Lack of native Unicode string literal support in C Migration issues from proprietary implementation to ICU Different levels of Unicode support between OS and ICU

What is ICU? Roadmap and Myths San Jose, California September nd International Unicode Conference16 References ICU main site: – –Links to Download ICU User Guide, Technical FAQ, Support, Bug Reports Unicode Consortium – Unicode glossary, Unicode character database IBM Developerworks –

What is ICU? Roadmap and Myths San Jose, California September nd International Unicode Conference17 Questions and Answers