User's Guide
Because many languages exist in the world today, it's important to
design applications that are language friendly; that is, user
friendly for all languages. Building an application that has its user
interface only in English inhibits use of that application by people who
don't know English.
If you are creating applications that are language friendly, VisualAge
helps you in several areas:
- Externalization of text
- The user interface for your application might have text that the user
sees. This text includes labels in your windows and messages that are
displayed. VisualAge can extract this text and place it into an
editable file so it can be translated easily.
- Country information support
- Your operating system has specific country information. This
includes date separators and currency symbols like the French franc and the
German mark. VisualAge uses the country settings from the operating
system and the settings you select in settings views to display this data
correctly. To see what country settings your system uses, display
Locale current.
- Double-byte support
- Some languages include characters that are stored in two bytes instead of
a single byte. Double-byte characters are primarily found in Asian
languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. VisualAge provides
classes and methods that work with double-byte strings. To see whether
your system uses single-byte or double-byte strings, display Locale
current preferredStringClass.
-
- Here is a good guideline to follow: don't place text or
characters that can't be translated in your source code. Use the
tools described in this chapter to place them in files where they are easily
accessible for translation, and have your application retrieve the text or
characters at run time.
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