Contents:

• This month's meeting
• Meeting Location
• Last month's meeting
• Upcoming meetings
• Library Notes

This Month's Meeting: A Practical Approach to Software Internationalization

The object of this talk is to help software engineers develop a methodology to drastically reduce the cost of internationalization and localization of applications. Creating a global market presence by simply customizing, converting products separately for each target territory - locale, is typically very expensive and time consuming. This brute-force approach carries a heavy cost of creating multiple product versions, each requiring separate maintenance and support.

The state-of-the-art approach breaks globalization into two steps. A sub-system level analysis of the components and third party software helps decide target encapsulation objects. In the first step, application is designed and implemented as locale neutral, with all locale sensitive data separated from the application, and the application capable of operation in multiple locales. At this stage, light weight encapsulation objects are created that help ensure that the application is I18N safe. This prevents revisit of the entire application code later. The step 2 presents the actual application tailoring for a specific locale. Locale sensitive data, such as text, formats and layouts are translated into the target locale, and product is re-tested and released. Only the step 2 is repeated for each target locale, sharing the same product core, resulting in a single product maintenance and support.

The U.S. share of the global computing market will decline from 56% in 1985 to 28% in 2000. Any significant commercial software product will have to be globalized. If you don't currently have customers demanding globalized software, perform step 1 now. This can be done at about 10% extra cost and will save you 90% of the cost later. Ideas will be shared on a few easy tools that you can write to recover your investment quickly.

The speaker, Sunil Prakash, is the President of Global Software Focus, Inc. GSF is involved in both consulting on internationalization of software as well as the development of a tool set to assist in software internationalization.

Meeting Location

Our Last Meeting

At the November meeting of the Front Range UNIX Users Group we had a panel of speakers sharing their experiences with the free Apache web server. We gave away copies of O'Reilly's Apache: The Definitive Guidealong with the companion CD-ROM, and we have one for the library.

See the previous meetings page on the Fruug web site for more detail.

Upcoming Meetings

January: We're working on a CORBA talk to follow-up from October. This meeting will probably be the last week of January.

Contact the FRUUG Executive Committee at fruug at fruug.org if you have other interesting topic ideas or are interested in presenting a fruug talk.

FRUUG Library Notes

You may check books out using your business card as your library card; you must be on the membership list to check books out. Books are due at the meeting following the one in which they are checked out. If you don't return your library books by the next meeting, you might find yourself on our overdue book list. We count on you returning books on time so that other members may have the chance to use them as well.

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Last Updated: 25 November 1997. Problems? Contact webmaster at fruug.org

February 2008: FRUUG Enters Quiescent Phase
After 27 years running, we're suspending operations.

Future Meetings:
None planned