write once... take less time to deploy

WORLDWARECONFERENCE

Write Once…

Take Less Time to Deploy

Everywhere

Michael Labriola Senior Consultant

Digital Primates

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Who am I?

Michael LabriolaSenior Consultant

Digital Primates

• Client side architect specializing in Adobe Flex– Designed and implemented UCA and CLDR implementation for

ActionScript– Lead architect and developer of FlexUnit 4 and Fluint

• Flex Team Mentor• Individual Member of the Unicode Consortium• Architected applications deployed worldwide

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What are we going to cover?

The challenges of internationalizing and localizing an application

A general strategy for keeping some of these challenges in check by using a well-defined presentation tier

An overview of Adobe Flex

An understanding of how Flex can help

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Terminology

As with every technical debate, at some point the definition of the words internationalization(i18n) and localization(L10n) will be called into question.

Here are the definitions I choose to use for this presentation:

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Terminology

i18n – designing and developing a product to be easily adaptable to a multitude of cultures, languages and locations

L10n – Adapting that product to meet the needs to a specific market

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Challenges of global applications

Internationalization is not free.

It is usually not cheap.

Regardless of the platform you choose for development, it is never completely automatic

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Internationalization is a process and even more so an awareness that must be continually evaluated throughout development

It is made easier when considered from the beginning and disproportionately more difficult when it is an after thought

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International support is a business decision

The goal of internationalizing a product is to reach new markets

The ultimate goal is to ensure that the decision to pursue new markets is a business, not a technical, choice

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The decision to internationalize is a big deal

It means a bigger budget, new requirements and longer development and QA cycles

Why do it? Ideally to sell the same software the a new marketplace. To achieve a bigger ROI on software.

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Internationalization is not an all or nothing decision.

There are decisions as to the amount of support

The more support, the more cost, the more opportunity to reach new markets.

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Visibility of Efforts of 59

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Externalizing Content

Externalizing content is a highly visible step. It involves removing all hard coded labels and messages

While visible, only performing this step will mean that you can support different locales speaking the same language reasonably well. You can likely support some additional locales poorly.

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Challenges: Externalizing

Externalizing content means that nothing displayed to the user can be hard-coded in your application

Labels

User Messages

Error Messages

Reference Data

Date and Time Formats

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All external content must be defined in some external source such as a property file, XML document or even database

All code must respect variability. You cannot have code such as:

if ( selectedItem == "Male" ) {

}

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Further, when parsing user input, you cannot assume currency symbols, placement of text punctuation or order of elements.

Output display and input parsing need to work together else you are displaying one format to a user and asking them to enter data in another.

The result would be an unusable application

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Using Unicode

Unicode maps every viable character to a unique code point, allowing you access to a multitude of written languages

CLDR - Unicode Common Locale Data Repository provides locale specific data which explains how to use and format data for a given locale.

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Challenges: Unicode

There are various levels of Unicode support in different runtimes, development languages and tools

Internally storing strings for display and user input as Unicode code points is a great step forward, however, care still needs to be taken whenever searching, comparing or manipulating strings.

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Challenges: Unicode

Comparing strings in the world of Unicode is not quite the simple == operation many of us are used to.

Standard string comparison functions built into languages may or may not work for this purpose

Worse yet, they may appear to work in your locale and only break with others

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Challenges: Unicode

By way of example, different versions of the Flash runtime have different Unicode support.

Most versions store strings as UTF-16 internally, however, support for characters outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) is trickier and not as intuitive

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Challenges: Unicode

Further, remember that there is no such thing as a universal sort

Unicode helps us to define common characters. However, those characters are used in different locales in different ways.

The same physical character often sorts in a different order in neighboring locales

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Challenges: Unicode

Do not assume that your development tools, language, etc. understands and handles this sorting properly

Before version 10.1 of the Flash runtime, it was necessary to use 3rd party tools to accomplish this sorting correctly

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Dynamic Sizing and Placement

How much space content should take and where it should be placed on the screen is defined by language, locale and font

It is unlikely that a translated message to another language will ever take the exact same amount of screen space.

Some locales will expect form headings and scroll bars to be in drastically different places.

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Challenges: Sizing and Placement

Therefore, you can never assume an absolute font size. Some glyphs cannot be accurately displayed below approximately a 12pt font

You can also never assume that two strings will concatenate in the same way in different languages.

Care must be taken with text inputs embedded in a string

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As noted, strings represented in different languages and different fonts take different amounts of space to display

Not only can you not assume the size of a field, you must also not assume absolute positioning of other fields

Sizing and placement must be handled fluidly

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Screen shot of app with fixed size

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Dynamic sizes but not dynamically positioned

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Resized and repositioned

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Customizing Views

Customizing views per locale is the ultimate expression of localization

How do you manage to have customized views per locale and not allow it to become a nightmare of custom builds and custom code?

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Solutions

So, how do you define an effective client side architecture for i18n and L10n application?

You need to start by separating meaning from display

For example, Unicode maps characters. It allows others to decide how those might appear on the screen

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Number

1 is a number, it represents a count of some abstract item. We can represent it a variety of ways but it has a known meaning:– 1– 1.0– 1,0– 1.00000000– One– Uno

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Numbers

Similarly 3 quarters of a whole has a meaning, regardless of presentation:– .75– ¾– 0,75

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Dates

Dates also represent a point in time relative to another point in the past. While the choice of fixed point may vary from culture to culture the meaning of a date is the same:

– 03/14/2010– 14/03/2010– The fourteenth of March, year Two Thousand and

Ten Anno Domini – 29, Rabi' al-awwal ( األول 1431 (ربيع

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Reference Data

Even non-simple types share the same trait. For example, the biological sex of an individual has a specific meaning which is conveyed regardless of the word used to describe it

– Male or Female– M or F– Macho o Hembra

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Meaning

In all cases there is an underlying meaning which is being shown in one of a variety of ways

Understanding the meaning of data separate from the way it is shown or the way it is entered is a major part of the solution for client internationalization problems

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Meaning

In other words, we need to separate the idea of presenting the data from the meaning

This fits inline with the idea of a multi tiered approach to client-server architecture

..which fits in very well with my talk.

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Tiers of 59

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Solving the problem

The major focus of our i18n work is the presentation tier.

Storing and saving data with meaning in mind, and never with format

Relying on the presentation tier to format and interpret incoming format into raw data.

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Why?

Well, let’s consider the alternative

• Does it make sense at the data level?– Once data is stored with format it becomes a constant

struggle to interpret it for different locales. However, your data layer needs to be capable of storing i18n info.

• Does it make sense at the logical level?– The logical level should do operations on data. To me it is

very important that the data is already normalized before the logical layer touches it. The biggest challenge is not messing it up here.

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Solutions

This is where Adobe Flex plays a key role

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Adobe Flex Primer

Adobe Flex is a technology designed to build the presentation tier of rich Internet applications.

These applications resemble client server applications more than web applications

They are executed in a virtual machine on the client.

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Adobe Flex Primer

Flex is an open source framework

Flex encourages extension and re-composition, meaning that while there are many core Flex pieces available, you can reshape them as needed into a viable presentation layer for your product.

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Adobe Flex Primer

Flex applications can be deployed in two ways

Web: which means that Flash Runtime is the virtual machine

Desktop: which means that Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is the runtime

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Adobe Flex Primer

Why use Flash Player? It’s a good runtime.

Some version of Flash Player is installed on 99% of the Internet connected personal computers in mature markets and still over 98% in emerging markets.

Currently, the penetration and update rate to the newest version is faster than any other runtime

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Adobe Flex Primer

Flex itself is a component framework which allows ease of assembling presentation tier user interfaces using XML markup.

Flex can be thought of as a domain specific language for creating user interfaces.

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Adobe Flex Primer

In that capacity, Flex has a specific philosophy which makes it extremely practical for our purposes

In Flex a developer creates views which automatically monitor and react to changes in an underlying data model.

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Adobe Flex Primer

That means that, in general, a Flex developer interacts with data.

The view of that data is represented by one or more classes and can vary without changing the underlying logic.

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Adobe Flex Primer

It is viable to say that, in Flex, the concepts of form and function are decoupled.

You can define the functionality of a component or view. That functionality can remain in tact regardless of how you choose to display it on the screen.

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Adobe Flex Primer

So, why does Flex make sense for an i18n application?

Because developers can interact with meaning. The formatting of that meaning becomes part of the view.

As the form and function are separate, you can have multiple, very distinct views of the same data without rewriting the functionality in any way

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Adobe Flex Primer

Let’s take a look at some of the specific tools available to the Flex developer which aid in this goal

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Data Binding

Data Binding is a key concept where the view monitors data for changes.

When a chance occurs, the view updates as in this simple Currency example

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Measurement and Layout

One of the biggest strengths of Flex is its ability to auto size and auto layout content.

This is a very quick example of dynamic layout

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Property Files

Flex allows you to define your externalized strings in property files.

Those property files can be added to a project at compile time or loaded at runtime as needed

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Formatters and Validators

As was briefly demonstrated with the data binding example, Flex has a rich set of extensible Formatters and Validators for display and data.

By default the formats for these controls are also controlled externally via properties files. They can be assembled together to achieve the separation of data versus presentation discussed here.

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Unicode Support

Internally Flex depends on the string storage capabilities of the Flash or AIR runtime.

All strings are internally stored as Unicode in UTF-16.

Flash Player can render and allow input of Unicode characters. It can also render any Unicode character to the screen

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Rich Text Engine

To that end, Flex has access to TLF (Text Layout Framework) that works with Flash Player 10.0 and above.

This layout framework allows rendering of Unicode characters, BiDirectional text and allows for the flowing of that text around other objects with intelligent wrapping

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Collation

As of version 10.1, Flash has native access to Unicode collation, however, even earlier version were able to use these features due to Flex’s inherent capability for extension.

Libraries exist that support locale specific collation with full configuration of the operation

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Layout Mirroring

Flex 4 will natively support layout mirroring, however, extensions already exist for earlier versions that allow full page flipping

Like most of the other Flex features, the burden is not placed on the application for this feature, but rather the framework itself

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Component Skinning

Component Skinning is the first place that one can truly begin to understand the message of form and function separation

When skinning a component or view it is possible to completely change anything visual about the component without ever changing the functionality

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Contact Information

[email protected]

http://twitter.com/mlabriola

Michael Labriola Senior Consultant

Digital Primates

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