1. I NTERNATIONALIZATION ASPECTS IN DEVELOPING WEB APPLICATIONS FOR C ENTRAL AND E AST E UROPE Rok Žontar, Jernej Novak, Andrej Krajnc, Marjan Heričko

2. Agenda Introduction and motivation Why develop multi language applications? Problems and difficulties Some good practices Conclusion

3. Why develop multi-lingual?

4. Slovenia

5. Some facts Slovenia 2 million 20.000 km 2 $ 25.000 4 Yes Russia 10 billion 17.000.000 km 2 $ 15.000 14 No Population: Area: GDP per capita: Neighboring countries: Played at the FIFA World Cup:

6. 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]

7. Bad practices Separate applications for each language Copy backend, change frontend Only few applications support multi language natively Drawbacks: o Time consuming o Hard to maintain o Different look and feel

8. How to develop? User interface Middle tier Database

9. Different patterns for storing data o Attribute per language o Language identification by foreign key o Separate entities (independent, dependent and language) Different alphabets o Latin o Cyrillic Solution: Unicode

10. Unicode

11. 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

12. User interface Most affected part of internationalization Compositional changes Incorporate images instead of plain text

13. Templating frameworks HTML generation based on templates using string substitution Many free and open-source A solution using XSL transformation

14. 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

15. What about AJAX? AJAX = JavaScript + Web Services Additional data about the language is needed JavaScript templating frameworks Request Data

16. 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

17. QUESTIONS ? Большое спасибо !