Introduction: Internationalization

Explore the key concepts pertaining to the internationalization service, a WebSphere extension for improving developer productivity. With the internationalization service, you can automatically recognize the time zone and location information of the calling client so that your application can act appropriately. The technology enables you to deliver each user, around the world, the right date and time information, the appropriate currencies and languages, and the correct date and decimal formats.

Globalization

An application that can present information to users according to regional cultural conventions is said to be globalized: The application can be configured to interact with users from different localities in culturally appropriate ways. In a globalized application, a user in one region sees error messages, output, and interface elements in the requested language. Date and time formats, as well as currencies, are presented appropriately for users in the specified region. A user in another region sees output in the conventional language or format for that region. Globalization consists of two phases: internationalization (enabling an application component to use regional conventions) and localization (implementing a specific regional convention).

Internationalization context: Propagation and scope

The scope of internationalization context is implicit. Every Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) client application, servlet service method, and EJB business method invocation has two internationalization contexts under which it runs. For each application component invocation, the container enters the caller context and the invocation context, as indicated by the pertinent internationalization policy, into scope before the container delegates to the actual implementation. When the implementation returns, the service removes these contexts from scope. The internationalization service supplies no programmatic mechanism for components to explicitly manage the scope of internationalization context.

Internationalization context: Management policies

Internationalization policies prescribe how J2EE application components or their hosting containers manage internationalization context on component invocations. Two internationalization context management policies apply to all component types: Application-managed internationalization (AMI) and Container-managed internationalization (CMI).