Localization and Globalization - Section 1
Introduction
From some time I plan to write this article but every time I postpone it due heavy load from work and my study, but since we are in last days of January 2010and I didn't post any new posts yet I decide to make this post as my first one in this year. Where I gone try to discusses several solution that may help us to understand and build a dynamic system in an efficient way without need for extra work, load or cost to reach such solutions. so what we gone do?
- Compare different approaches that utilize globalization/localization by end user.
- Discuss most common solution for each approaches to reach to our ultimate goal by comparing the pro and cons side of it.
- Improve our own most general solution.
- Conclusions
From my experience in development and administration world I face big challenges and difficulties related to tasks multilingual systems because each customer or client look for multilingual only from his point of view, where I found that we have mainly two type of localization that user may want for his/her solution first one it most common in Blog engines, CMS, CMR and some simple web sites where customer looks to give his solution his natural language where we don't have to have multiple translation for the same post for example. next approach it is the opposite for previous one where we need to provide each system content blog post, news, .... in different languages based on user preferred language or local settings.
In either types of utilization of these approaches we may use almost the same solutions in one way or another, first and most common way to use system resources as described in this MSDN link, where we define our system static text, formats, and any localized resource in different languages as needed, may some of you right now thin how this could be useful in system that requires localization of dynamic posts too if this idea pop in your head that mean you are on the right track to figure that this one of the main disadvantage of this solution since some of developers use this approach and deploy multiple versions of this or that application for every required language(which I consider a miss to have multiple applications to do the same task multiplied by number cultures your client deal with) and another disadvantage for this solution that in case our client want to add his own language let say (English Pirate) he can't do that without going back for you to add this custom language for him/her which mean more cost and time that you need to expend to add this language, rebuild your application, and deploy it again (maybe in business this is good because you gain extra money for each time your client request new updates on your app, but what if this is you boos ^.^ ) but there is also an advantage of this approach that this a build-in feature inside .net framework which make it easy to access and to implement since it supported by VS wizard tools.
So how to find a solution that may save our time (on later stages no development at this moment), effort, installation, and configurations? I will let you with this question till I complete next section.
Hope to see some of your comments and suggestions on this topic, and till next section be ready wish you a good luck