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A Single, Global Software that
scales to your requirement.
Business is increasingly more complex
and competitive today. To thrive and grow, a company must expand its
market presence, globalize its products and improve its information
technology infrastructure. It must ensure its products are
language-neutral and can be easily tailored for each target market.
IT organizations must address the technology issues and complexities
associated with supporting multinational operations. Information must
be retrieved in multiple languages and the integrity of data must be
maintained as it moves through a distributed, heterogeneous computing
environment. Incompatible data encoding formats, which vary by locale
and system, must be collectively managed. Meeting the needs of such
multilingual environment requires a unified system architecture that
can support local needs without the incompatibilities often found
when using different localized versions of software. Developers need
a framework upon which they can develop applications that can be
deployed without modifications across the global network while
supporting the needs of local users.
Solaris single binary,
internationalized framework offers developers a set of APIs to help
meet these needs and provides an environment for multilingual
computing.
Solaris Single
Binary Model
Sun released Solaris 8, a new version
of the Solaris operating environment early this year. All previous
releases of the Solaris Operating System right up to the most
recent release of version 8, have been based upon a single binary
architecture. The Solaris operating environment is an example of a
product that supports both internationalization and localization. It
is a single binary that has been localized into multiple language
versions. Each of these localized versions contains cultural and
linguistic support for the specific language. In Solaris, a locale is
composed of both a base language, the country (territory) of use and
the applicable codesets. An English-speaking user in the United
States can select the en_US locale (English for the United
States), while an English-speaking user in Great Britain can select
en_GB locale
(English for Great Britain but with different time/currency
formatting).
With the release of Solaris 8
multilingual product and Sun's continued commitment to a single
binary model, this has provided developers with enhanced
infrastructure and interfaces needed to create internationalized
software. The new Solaris 8 multilingual product has included full
Unicode 3.0 support, as also defined in ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000. It is a
major international release with a single packaging approach to
universal language coverage, expanded locales, intuitive European
locale repackaging as well as many other new enhancements. In this
article, we will focus on the creation of this new single global
product structure in the Solaris 8 Operating System, as
well as talk about how the new operating environment has been
enhanced to provide better data interoperability and enhanced user
extensibility and customizability.
Single Global Product Structure
The Solaris 8 operating environment now
includes support for more than 123 locales, covering 37 languages,
all on a single, global product structure. Some of the new locales
added are Iceland (ISO8859-1) and Russian (ANSI1251) locales. The
latter is in addition to the existing Russian (ISO8859-5) locale
found in previous versions of Solaris, and it provides native
Microsoft data encoding support.
This single global packaging approach
greatly simplifies the development and testing of applications for
international markets. In the past, users had to order multiple media
kits to support testing of their applications in multiple locale
environments. With this new product structure, all language
environments are now available on the Base CD while fully translated
messages and online help is available on a separate Language CD. What
this means is that the standard Solaris 8 base product will provide
an English interface to input, display and print text in a target
language, including multibyte locales while, the Solaris 8
Multilingual product will come with an additional Language CD that
provides localized interface and translated documentation. This new
single structure eliminates the need to purchase optional media kits
each time developers want to set up a different non-English
development or production environment.
User-intuitive
Installation and Setup
Users will also find the setup and
installation to be significantly easier, whether installing only a
single language or the full range of 37 languages packaged with the
Solaris 8 operating environment. The new installation interface in
the Solaris 8 operating environment enables users to install only
those regions for which they require locale support. Unlike previous
releases which have the locale support tied to the software cluster
installed, this new interface greatly helps users and developers
easily add and remove locales as and when needed. In short, changes
to the packaging on the Solaris 8 CD have reduced the storage
requirements for a mixed language installation and a redesign of the
install interface makes language selection and grouping extremely
intuitive.
Enhanced Internationalization
Framework
Solaris 8
Operating System has expanded the set of Unicode (UTF-8) locales
from Solaris 7. It supports numerous additional European Unicode
locales as well as additional Unicode locales for Simplified Chinese
and Traditional Chinese. With all these Unicode locales now
supporting the latest Unicode standard version 3.0, Solaris 8's
multiscript environment has been further enhanced. With the full
support for Complex Text Layout (CTL) scripts as well, developers and
users can display text from multiple languages in a single
environment, including proper rendering of text for bidirectional and
context-sensitive shaping scripts like Arabic, Hebrew and Thai in the
Unicode locale.
Enhanced user
extensibility and customizability
In many languages of the world,
especially those based on Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts, there
are no difference between how text is stored for data processing and
how it is presented on a display device or a printer in usual cases.
The text is read horizontally from left to right and the characters
are stored in a manner identical to how they are processed.
However, not all languages of the world
share these characteristics. Some Middle East and South East Asian
languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Lao, Hindi have complex
characteristics like bidirectionality and context-sensitive shaping
that require special processing of character/text data before actual
rendering of the characters/text on display devices.
Due to their complex characteristics,
it has been quite difficult to perform the special pre-processing of
these languages with a single unified algorithm in a computer
program. In the past, such special processing has been done using a
software component called layout engine (LE) which is specifically
designed to support a single language/script per LE. In Solaris 8
Operating System, we have created a Universal Multiscript
Layout Engine (UMLE) which is a layout engine that is codeset
independent, user customizable, and multiscript capable such that it
can handle multiple scripts in providing the layout services. It is
codeset independent because it can handle not only Unicode but also
any other kind of codesets, thus making it universal. It is
user-customizable as it allows users to create new behavior or
customize existing behavior of the layout engine without touching the
source of the layout engine. Compared to the locale-specific layout
engine approach, the UMLE approach is much more flexible, multiscript
capable, easier to maintain and has the ability to add new complex
text layout scripts.
Another area of enhancement was in the
creation of an user-extensible code conversion utility, geniconvtbl.
In the past, developers were not able to include their custom-defined
code conversions without time and resources from Sun's engineering
team. By using geniconvtbl utility, customers can now define
and use their own code conversions in Solaris. Developers can easily
create user-defined codeset converters, enabling table driven
creation and easy addition of new codeset conversions using
geniconvtbl. This new capability enhances the ability of an
application to deal with incompatible data types, particularly data
generated from proprietary or legacy applications. It also supports
modification to existing Solaris codeset conversions. The following
diagram illustrates how geniconvtbl works in Solaris operating
environment.
The
utility, geniconvtbl permits user-defined and
user-customizable codeset conversions with a standard system utility
and interface like iconv (1) and iconv (3). The
geniconvtbl utility accepts customer's code conversion
definition in a flat text file and generates a code conversion binary
table file that Solaris can understand and perform the code
conversions.
Enhanced Data
Interoperability
In addition to enhanced user
extensibility, data interoperability with non-Solaris environment has
also been improved in the Solaris 8 operating environment with the
addition of many new data conversion utilities. There are code
converters for Japanese mainframe data types, code converters for
Microsoft data encoding (including user defined characters), Asian
UTF-8 interoperability (e.g. China and Korea), as well as converters
for various Unicode encoding formats and international and de facto
industry standard codesets, as shown in the diagram below.
In Summary...
Solaris's long standing, single binary,
internationalized system together with the new single global product
structure, enables enterprises to install multiple locales and reside
concurrently on a remote server, with the ability to add and remove
any locales as and when needed to. At the same time, users at the
client end can have the flexibility and ease in customizing their own
native language environment and still be able to call upon mixed
applications with different locales to the same single desktop.
For application developers and
independent software vendors, Solaris 8 Operating System
provides greater extensibility and better data interoperability in a
heterogeneous network computing environment. With an enhanced set of
codeset converters, users can now define and use their own code
conversions in Solaris 8, as well as have the ability to interoperate
with some of the legacy and PC based multilingual data. Together with
an integrated set of enhanced Unicode locales, support for latest
standard of Unicode 3.0 and enhanced interface protocols, the
development of true multilingual applications and web-based
applications in the dot-com space has gotten even easier on Solaris
8.
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