Readings, Thoughts, Project Plan!

I've been doing a lot of reading over the past week on the following topics:

• Translation management - i18n & l10n.
• Spring Framework.
• Current Java i18n/l10n solutions.
• ACS-Lang by OpenACS.

In my readings I came across encoding, which I hadn't yet considered. It looks like it shouldn't be a problem because everything should support UTF-8 which will cover all the characters required. I will probably devote at least a small section of the final thesis document to encoding as it is both relevant to the topic and interesting.

Other difficulties that I hadn't previously considered also arose:

• Versioning - what happens when the core text changes?
• Left to Right text!!
• Text on images.
• The importance of tracking the author and the translation history of the text.
• Nuances in languages, different ordering of sentences.

These considerations are going to factor heavily on what limitations I put on the scope of the project.

My proposed solution, 'very' broadly will be to develop a webapp similar to that of the ACS-lang demonstration but using Java/Spring. These design should be such that the translation management objects are independent and can be used in other projects. Unfortunately, I'm still not 100% clear how I'll actually go about the design at this stage.

Project Plan due Friday 1st Aug!
Structure will be as follows:

• Title & Project Brief
• Description of Project
• Introduction

1. What is Spring?
2. What is internationalisation?
3. What is localisation?

• Overview of relevant research

1. OpenACS solution
2. Existing Java solutions
3. Other research
4. Questions raised by research and my thoughts

• Proposed procedure
• Timetable
• Bibliography