Internationalization in applications – Call for discussion
Posted by admin in Internationalization, PHP on March 1st, 2009
At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer.
~Marshall Lumsden
This is an experiment in designing an internationalization feature which I’ve been thinking about for a while. The idea is for people to come up with designs and implementations for the described requirements, and get a healthy discussion going on how to get a feature like this implemented in the best way. I’ve came up with some features and requirements which should make the design somewhat interesting.
Wanna play? If so, continue reading.
Now, let’s consider a website, which is to be deployed for several markets (in several countries), and serve both residential and corporate customers.
Requirements
A “tag” is an identifier for any given text that may be translated. The “tag” can be the text itself in the source language, or an identifier such as LABEL_CLICK_HERE, all depending on the implementation.
A tag’s content can be translated to any given language
This is the most basic feature, and does not need any explanation.
Any given market should be able to use the application in any given language
Customers in the French market should be able to view the application in German and so on. Does not sound tricky, but see next point.
A tag’s content *may* have different meaning in different markets
For example, in the US a zipCode validation error will differ from the zipCode validation error used in Spain, but surname validation errors will be the same. This also goes for descriptive texts for features and services which might differ. However, for 90%+ of the translated texts, the English translation in Spain would be the same as the english translation in the US.
A tag’s content *may* differ based on the context of the user
Imagine the front-page when a used is logged in. A text is presented here with information about available features, instructions on how to use them etc. Now, some of these features are not available for residential customers, while some are exclusive to residential customers. The usage/instructions of the features may be different for corporate customers. In addition, both residential and corporate customers have roles in the application (admin users and regular users), and the content may differ based on the role. Most of the tags will just have one content, but some may have several. The available contexts could be visualized as a tree structure, with ‘ALL’ at the top, which forks out to corporate and residential, which in turn forks out to admin / user:
Contexts
When retrieving content for a tag the system should first look for the user’s context, for example “Residential Admin”, and if no content is present it shall select the parent etc.
Any changes to a tags’s content should be kept in a history log
Every time a tag’s content is changed, the old version should be kept for historical purposes. A nice bonus would be to be able to change a tag’s content ahead of time , that is, setting an effective date.
These are the basic requirements I’ve made up for this experiment. Now, I’d like to hear how you tackle internationalization in your application, and how you would design a implementation which would sastisfy the requriements described here. I’m working on my own implementation for this which I’d like to share after I’ve seen what other people come up with. If you have suggestions for more requirements which would make this even more interesting, please send a comment!
Technorati Tags: PHP, Internationalization
Blog refresh, playing with XNA Game Studio
Posted by admin in Frameworks, General on February 28th, 2009
So, I finally got around to upgrading Wordpress and setting up a proper theme. I still want to customize it a bit, but it’s fine for now.
I’ve recently started playing with XNA Game Studio, and I’m really impressed with what Microsoft has pulled off with this framework. I found a starter-kit for a platformer, and I was up and running, making new content and features in less than 45 mins. It’s been a long time since I last worked with C#, and I found it refreshing to get back to it. I’ll try to do some posts on it later on.
Getting back to business!
Posted by admin in Frameworks, General, Hardware, Life, Multi-touch, PHP, Prado on December 18th, 2008
I’ve been dormant for quite some time, mainly due to a major project going on at work. This week I’m starting my vacation, and its time to get back to all things fun. Today I got offered a spot on the Prado Developer Team, which I hope will prove to be both a challenge and a great opportunity to improve my knowledge on both the framework and PHP.
As a part-time project I’ve started building a multi-touch display surface inspired by Microsoft Surface. I’ve completed a *very* basic edition (tutorial here, and I’ve just started planning a more complicated setup along the lines of this project.
I’ll do some posts on the process as soon as I get some pictures.
Technorati Tags: PHP, Prado, Multi-touch
Tip: What every programmer should know about memory
Posted by admin in Hardware, Memory, Tips, Unix/Linux on August 31st, 2008
Some time ago a friend of mine tipped me about this article series called “What every programmer should know about memory” written by Ulrich Drepper (lead contributor and maintainer of glib). I just recently came around to start reading it. This is a 100 page long text which covers computer memory in detail, with focus on how software interacts with memory. From RAM to CPU caches the text moves on to tips on how we as programmers can improve our code when it comes to memory management and performance. A really good read which I suggest every programmer should check out.
Technorati Tags: Hardware, Memory, Unix/Linux
VCL/PHP followup
Posted by admin in Delphi for PHP, Frameworks, PHP, Prado, VCL4PHP on August 26th, 2008
After receiving quite some feedback on my post “Why Delphi for PHP should have used Prado instead of VCL” I decided to do a follow up to that post. Some of the feedback was quite interesting, hence this post was born.
First and foremost I’d like to address the feedback I got regarding the class name prefixing in VCL/PHP. I argued that the lack of class prefixes could create problems in the future, and used Prado’s T notation as as sample of something that would at least be a bit better. Let’s take a look at two VCL/PHP classes named Collection and Object. These two names are often reserved in programming langues (atleast object oriented ones). If PHP decides to introduce these two classes the VCL/PHP guys would be pretty screwed. It would involve refactoring the framework as well as applications which uses those classes. Prado on the other hand has a prefix (TCollection etc. minor, but it’s a world of difference). I assume that the VCL/PHP authors will introduce namespace support with PHP 5.3, so this issue will hopefully be a thing of the past when 5.3 ships. That said, I’m a bit curious to see how the migration / backwards compability would turn out if VCL/PHP adopt namespaces.
What I miss in the feedback I got from my previous post was people acually using VCL/PHP for enterprise applications and how that is working. From what I can tell the usage of Exceptions is still limited to the 3rd party libs such as Zend Framework which are included with VCL/PHP. That’s a bit interesting.
I’d like to touch on the comment made by Pieter Viljoen for my original post. I agree that Codegear pushed quite a toolset for the PHP community in a short time, but the underlying code is not enterprise quality. One can argue that PHP is ugly and flawed (not sure I agree on that part), but that does not mean that one should not strive for good architecture and methodology when developing frameworks on top of PHP. I see the point that VCL/PJP offers features that are interesting for starting PHP developers, but for large scale applications I just don’t see it. I’d be pretty cautious pulling in a framework without exception support if I was to create an application.
Again, I’m really interested in some feedback from someone that actually has built applications with VCL/PHP.
I’ve also noticed that there is not much activity in the VCL/PHP SVN repository. Anyone know what’s going on there?
Comments moved from old blog
If some of you recently got email saying you just made a comment here, it’s most likely due to that I moved some comments over from my old blog (http://eirikhoem.wordpress.com/). I’ll get around to answering any questions later today. Thanks for commenting!
Simple config management for PHP
When doing complex applications it’s often nice to have some sort of system for handling settings. PHP has a nice function called parse_ini_file which can be used to create a basic but still usable setting file feature. A simple class which loads the configuration file and offers some methods to retrieve the values for a given key is all that’s needed. The example I’m providing is pretty basic, but it’s still very usable and can be added to almost any application.
First, we need to create a file to hold the settings. It’s ordinary plaintext and follows the INI format.
Here is a quick sample of some key / value pairs:
[general]
locale = no_NO
company.name = MyCompany
datasource.host = localhost
datasource.database = mydb
datasource.username = user
datasource.password = 1234
The class for accessing the file:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 | class MyConfigClass{ protected $config; public function __construct() { $this->config = parse_ini_file('../conf/myapp.ini'); } public function getConfig($key = null) { if($key !== null) { if(isset($this->config[$key])) { return $this->config[$key]; } else { throw new Exception("Unknown key '$key' in configuration"); } } else { return $this->config; } } public function setConfig($config) { $this->config = $config; } } ?> |
Usage:
1 2 3 | $configManager = new MyConfigClass(); $value = $configManager->getConfig['datasource.host']; |
Now, when working on larger application one usually have a application like class, and that’s a nice place to put this code. When using Prado I usually place the config code in the TApplication class.
Technorati Tags: PHP
Firefox java problem with Ubuntu 8.04 Solved!
I’ve been struggling with lava support for Firefox after upgrading from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04. All I had to do was to remove the package called icedtea-gcjwebplugin. Now, I don’t know my way around Java anymore, but at least it did the trick. Worth a shot if you have problems.
Update:
John has some more information on this issue if the above didn’t do the trick:
I also needed to link to the new plugin….
cd /usr/lib/firefox-3.0/plugins$
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so
Thanks John!
Technorati Tags: Java, Firefox, Ubuntu
Handy online regex tool for PHP, Perl, JS and Python
A coworker of mine has been working on a ajax enabled regex tool which lets you evaluate regex expressions in several languages (including PHP PCRE and PHP POSIX) with instant results. You can choose which functions to use, such as match, match all, replace, split etc. It also offers some basic help and hints. It’s really handy when working on those painful expressions.
You can check it out at http://regex.larsolavtorvik.com/. Stop by his blog as well.
Technorati Tags: PHP, Perl, JavaScript, Python
Populate PDF templates with PHP / FPDF / FPDI
Ever wanted to generated PDF documents on the fly with PHP? Perhaps populate a standard contract with a customers name and address? FPDF and FPDI are two neat libraries which greatly helps when working with PDF files. FPDF is the main library for handling PDF files, while FPDI lets your import existing PDF documents into the FPDF documents. In the code sample I’ve prepared here I’m importing a PDF template document, writing some information to the document, then sending it to the “customer”. FPDF offers several neat ways to expose the generated document, such as a stream to the browser, a string, or just storing it to file. You can download PDF Sample code to test it.
Be sure to head on over to the FPDF site and FPDI site for more information on these two libs.
Related posts:
Generated PDFs over HTTPS with Internet Explorer
Technorati Tags: PHP, PDF, Frameworks
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