Internationalisation - Greg's Blog

A subject that I have been interested in since my Sapient days, only then it was referred to it as globalisation [G11N] [personally I think localisation [I10N]/internationalisation [I18N] sounds better, but these two form a subset of G11N] and it has been receiving a little interest over the last couple of months in the ColdFusion developer community and most notably in CFDJ which published a couple of articles over the last few months on the topic.

The first one was Ray Camden, which introduced the basic concepts and terminology of localisation as well as a small working example. Ray also pointed to a few resources:

The second article by Paul Hastings is much more about putting case for the importance of I18n and l10n forward. Some nice facts and figures on the usage of the internet and it’s growth around the world, which clearly point to taking this seriously as a development practice. He also covers the terminology in this field.

I came across another article by Paul Hastings over at DevNet on the topic and this covers a lot of the points above but also contains a few pointers to good practices. Yep that’s right good, not best, as Paul indicates this is very much and emerging field and hence a lot of learning and re-assessing is being done. However I don’t think there is much doubt, that Paul is the cf guru on this topic at present.

Here is another i18N link with a set of functions for download. After a little bit of digging round the Sun web site I was also able to find the documentation for the native 2 ascii tool that was referred to in the CFDJ articles.