Localize-Notes

To reach the broadest audience, some applications support more than one language. Even if your application supports a single language, message resources are an effective tool for managing shared phrases throughout the application.

Presentation - Localizing Content

How can we internationalize applications? Which Struts tags are message-aware? Can we localize dates and numbers?

We overview the localization features, which are considered a fundamental part of the framework.

Resource Bundles
Struts Message Tags
Formatting Messages

Workshop - Localize

Story: In addition to English, MailReader must support other languages, including Japanese and Russian.

Localize the MailReader application using a standard Resource Bundle

Prerequisites

text tag
getText method
<s:message key="" /> idiom

Exercises

Copy the resources*.property files from "localize" on the CD

Pages

Localize the MailReader page by replacing static strings with references to an entry in the message resources.
- <s:text name="index.title"/>
- <s:textfield key="username"/>

Classes

Localize the MailReader classes by calling getText with a message key, instead of passing a static string.

Validations

Localize the validation configuration files by changing the message elements to use a key
- <message key="error.username.required"/>

Hint Code

On each page, use this markup before the <head> section

<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" %>
<%@ taglib uri="/struts2" prefix="s" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

On the Welcome page, use code like this to switch between each language.
- The code for Russian is "ru". Japan is "ja".

<li>
   <s:url id="en" action="Welcome">
      <s:param name="request_locale">en</s:param>
   </s:url>
   <s:a href="%{en}">English</s:a>
</li>

Here, we are appending the parameter "request_locale=en" to tell the framework which language to use.

The Japanese locale may not work under Tomcat 5.5

Accomplishments

Localized the MailReader application using a standard Resource Bundle

Extra Credit

Create a Selenium test that switches from English to French and back.

Page Operations

Browse Space