Hi all,
I have been looking recently at what it would take for us to step up to
icu4j 3.8 and thought I would give everyone a heads up on what I have
discovered.
The first thing is that icu4jni is no longer supported from this release
onwards. The icu4jni api have been incorporated into icu4j and are
implemented in pure Java now.
Secondly, the Bidi class has also been implemented fully in icu4j now,
so it is possible for us to also drop icu4c as a dependency and use pure
icu4j for this functionality.
The major advantage I see of moving to pure icu4j 3.8 is that we no
longer need to maintain prebuilt binaries of the icu4c and icu4jni
libraries across all platforms in our repository. This simplifies the
process of upgrading to new versions of icu and also allows us to move
to new platforms with greater ease.
I am currently testing a patch to switch over to icu 3.8 and completely
remove the need for icu4c/jni. I have discovered a couple of bugs in the
new Bidi functionality [1] which I have raised on the icu dev list and
are in the process of being fixed. I hope that once they are all
resolved we will be able to pick up a patched icu4j 3.8 jar for our use.
Im interested to hear if anyone has any comments/objections to this?
Regards,
Oliver
[1]
http://bugs.icu-project.org/trac/ticket/5952
http://bugs.icu-project.org/trac/ticket/5961
--
Oliver Deakin
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